Summer Magic

It’s been a busy few weeks. We haven’t posted much but there has been a lot going on. We appointed animation consultants Red & Blue Productions to help us bring the Farm to market. They have already provided some much needed advice. We had a meeting with them in London during the middle of the heat wave a couple of weeks ago. What we realised was that we have got something worthwhile but we needed to refine it in certain areas. There were questions about the tank to resolve, the age of Rufus, who the main characters were, even the name of the project has come under much scrutiny. (So don’t be surprised if the name changes!)

Since then we’ve had many discussions and we believe we’ve managed to address all the issues and make the project into a more coherent entity too. We’ve now got to do some rewriting on our pitch material and come up with a new script.

I had a week in Northumberland on holiday with my family. As we spent a few nights on a Farm and lots of time exploring castles, woods and gardens I’ve had lots of inspiration for the Farm! On one particular day we go caught in a heavy rain storm while we were in a thick forest. The rain hardly got through the tree canopy and it made everything really quite magical. This is me camping it up on the edge of the covering.
It really was a good day for thinking and I hope the new ideas will feed back into the show. I really like this next pic as it reminds me of a Totoro style landscape of tree-tunnels! We defiantly need to get some of this magical feeling into our farm.
This week we’ve had meetings about funding and we are hopeful that by the end of the year we might have our first animation tests of our main characters. I’ll let you know how this goes over the next few weeks.