I attended this year’s Coláiste Dhulaigh Keyframe 6 event on 5 February . The speakers included, Eoghan Dalton, Sarah Jane Kelly and Carmine Pucci.

Eoghan is the assistant director and Sarah Jane is the production manager at Gingerbread Animation. They spoke about the development and production of the Disney XD show Space Chickens in Space. The show is an Irish-Australian-Mexican-British co-production with a Thailand-based show runner and Norway-based directors (!)  They spoke talked about the production challenges that this brought (production calls at all hours – “Skype is your friend”) and also the creative challenges. The two directors,  Tommy and Markus Vad Flaaten have mostly created work for youtube and they wanted to bring that sensibility to a large-scale production.  The key word, we were told, was “random”, although Eoghan did point out that this doesn’t mean there are no rules – “random is a rule”. The presentation touched on all areas of production and was an informative glimpse at a unique style of directing for TV.

Carmine Pucci is an assistant Art Director at Brown Bag Films.  His talk was on how to build a killer portfolio.  Carmine was full of very useful advice and made interested (always Italian) comparisons, for example the portfolio should be like a Ferrari (gorgeous and fast).  He also talked about being an artist.  You have to be specific in the job you’re applying for, but also (just as important) ask yourself why you want this job in the first place and if you’re really good enough to get it. He spoke about the importance of personal work and made interesting points about ideas developing from other sources – comparing the Walking Dead to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and Star Wars to Lord of the Rings.

For the final talk of the day, I was in the peculiar position of being both a student and guest speaker. My hastily titled “Storytelling for Animation” focused on the how to tell stories on-screen in the best way possible as well as touching on story structure and tips and guidelines for directors.