|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
It’s hard to believe, but it has been eight years since Irish animation powerhouse Cartoon Saloon introduced the world to Puffin Rock, a charming series about the adventures of a lovable young puffin named Oona and her little brother Baba. This month, the property spreads its wings for a big-screen adventure titled Puffin Rock and the New Friends, directed by Jeremy Purcell and co-produced by Northern Ireland’s Dog Ears. In the new adventure, the show’s birds pair up with some new island arrivals to crack the mysterious disappearance of the last little egg of the season!
“It was back in December of 2017 when I first heard that the studio might be making a Puffin Rock movie,” recalls Purcell. “But it wasn’t until July 2019 when I officially started on the production. I had a couple of months of just myself and our line producer, Caoimhe Ní Bhrádaigh, before our core team, assistant director Lorraine Lordan, art director Fran Bravo, storyboard supervisor Aidan McAteer and editor Sophie Borlée all started.”
Revisiting the Coastal Characters
Purcell, who worked on the series as well as the studio’s features Song of the Sea and The Secret of Kells, says he and his team loved the series. “It has a special place in our professional hearts, but we knew starting out that we would have to make some changes — particularly to the story. We didn’t want to make just a 75-minute series episode. If we were going to keep the whole audience engaged, parents and children alike, we would have to age up the story a little.”
He says there were a lot of discussions about what makes Puffin Rock Puffin Rock. “It really helped keep the essence of the show by having some returning crew members — our assistant director Lorraine [Lordan], location designer Stefano Scapolan, and composer Einar Tönsberg (Eberg) had all worked on the series. It was a little bit like getting the team back together for one last mission, with a bunch of new team members of course.”
The director adds, “What I love about this adaptation is that we made a film that is true to the Puffin Rock world. It has everything you would expect — beautiful artwork, wonderful music, a great cast and, of course, Chris O’Dowd back as our narrator! But it’s also an engaging story about what makes a home. It’s worth 75 minutes of time and watching it on the cinema screen.”
Of course, the movie ran into all the usual challenges most productions faced during the COVID lockdowns. “It took longer for us to make than we intended,” notes Purcell. “We were a few months into pre-production when China went into lockdown, and the crew of the studio that we were working with were suddenly working from home. So, we started feeling the repercussions a little sooner than some other studios in Europe. But it wasn’t long before our team here in Kilkenny were in lockdown, too.”
Purcell considers his team fortunate, as they had a few months together beforehand, and they were able to keep working on the storyboard and animatic for the most part. “However, recruiting a production crew was very difficult since everyone was hiring animators at the time,” he recalls. “So, we worked as best we could with a reduced crew, and in February of this year we finished the sound mix. I’m not sure how many people in total from the different studios ended up working on the film, they were spread across five countries, but I was on it for just over three and half years.”
By the end of the second season of the show, the team had a good production rhythm in place, and they took advantage of that experience. “We didn’t want to waste all that knowledge and shorthand, and we had spent two seasons learning and refining,” says Purcell. “So, we basically replicated the TV series pipeline for the feature. We used Moho (although it was a newer version) for the animation, with Photoshop for the beautiful backgrounds, and After Effects once again for the compositing. We are very experienced in the studio with these three programs working together and new tools like meshes and automatic wind in the new Moho really helped a lot when animating a massive storm hitting the island in the movie.”
In addition to the pandemic, the team also had to deal with refining and re-working the script once they transitioned from the script to animatic stage. “Tomm Moore gave me a great piece of advice when working on the animatic: ‘Find what’s personal to you in the story.’ It made me realize that I knew Isabelle. Growing up, my family fostered children and we had many children who came to stay with us. Those who had to leave their old lives and start somewhere new, trying to make it a home. It really helped me to understand that character, and what she was going through and feeling about her situation.”
A Gentle World
So, why does the beautifully drawn world of Puffin Rock have such a universal appeal? “During the production of the movie, I would go on social media and search Puffin Rock just to remind myself what is important to the audience and what they love about it,” says Purcell. “I wanted to make sure we didn’t lose sight of it when making the movie. It might be obvious, but they loved the artwork, the lush, colorful backgrounds, the Irish accents of the characters, especially Chris as the narrator, and of course the music! That fact that the theme song is such an ear worm also gets a lot of mentions. The surprising thing I found was that audiences love that Puffin Rock was such a gentle show. It provided a sweet world they could retreat, and it’s a show that parents didn’t mind watching with their children — or even by themselves when they needed a little down time.”
He adds, “When it comes to the movie, we had the artwork, the Irish accents, Chris was back and the music is as catchy as ever, but we worked really hard on the less obvious, and wanted to create a movie the family could enjoy together as I think we have.”
Lastly, Purcell hopes the audience connects with the new character, Isabelle. “We had such a great new cast with new characters, but we also had to recast most of the series’ characters since our TV actors had grown up on us. But it also meant that we got to have Eva Whittaker, who played Maebh in Wolfwalkers, as our Isabelle, and she did a fantastic job. It’s such an emotional performance and I hope the audience connects with Isabelle. I hope they realize it will be OK when moving somewhere new — to be the new puffin, to make mistakes, to say you’re sorry and to make new friends. I think having empathy for others is the key take away of our movie.”
Wild Card will open Puffin Rock and the New Friends theatrically in Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland on July 7. WestEnd Films is the film’s sales agent.
