Tom Moore

My First talk was from Mr Tomm Moore, an Irish born illustrator who co-founded the animation company known as Cartoon Saloon. This talk was based around the creation of a film he directed called Song of the Sea. But also a brief history of his career.

His ability to co-found the animation was due to the boom in animation in Dublin in 1999. Cartoon Saloon put itself on the map with its first animated feature called Secret of the Kells which was in development from 1999 to 2009.

"Creating a film is like chain smoking - you have to have the next on ready before finishing the one you are on."

Most of the team had worked together before so the connections were already made so the creation process wasn't slow to start due to the new finding of friendships and connections.

co-production was his secret to making independent films. There was not one big co-producer that told Tomm what to do.

The financing of his animation projects was labelled as 'franken-finance' where small portions of financing from different people or companies were combined to finance the whole project.

The creation itself of this very appealing form of animation starts with water colour doodles and sketches, and with the inclusion of Photoshop to animate they wanted to still keep the very tangible, hand made aesthetic that made their animations look the way they do, so they used hand crafted textures and lines to achieve this look digitally.

One thing that Tomm wanted to do was to write the whole script by storyboarding it all, but this became too difficult as he started to burn himself out with the amount of work this was for him. This also helped him realise that the script was way too long!

When creating the characters, a whole group would keep drawing the same character in different poses and expressions and when there is an interesting pose or emotion they would then create a character sheet to bring it to life.

The one thing I learnt from this talk was the future of 2D animation. Tomm seemed to think that digital 2D animation was the future and I very much agree with him for these points: There is no smudging of lines or paint, and there are easy ways to get hand drawn textures and lines into the digital process so it would look exactly the same. Also it is easier to achieve tighter in-betweens and effects with digital 2D animation.