KIWI ANIMATION SELECTED AT ANNECY

'Santa Needs Help' - a series of four animated ads for Auckland City Mission's 2007 Christmas campaign, directed by Tom Reilly of Flying Start Pictures with 3D Animation directed by Paul Scott-James of Toybox, have been placed into final selection at the prestigious Annecy Animation Festival in France. (www.annecy.org)
Annecy is the world's leading and biggest animation festival, held annually in France. This is the first time Kiwi animation has been represented at Annecy in fifteen years. A short film, The Nightwatchman by Joe Wylie and John Robertson played there in 1993.
The spots were conjured up by Loic Cardon and Natalie Knight from Publicis Mojo and brought to life by a dedicated team who didn’t take much persuading once Jenny, the little star made from clay, batted her eyelids.
Tom Reilly and Simon Good painstakingly modelled all the miniature sets, characters and wardrobe. Jenny found her first role demanding while Santa found the late nights physically challenging. Even the reindeer mustered their best performances under lights and icing sugar.
Once the stop motion was in the can, the Toybox team worked harder than Santa’s elves. Paul Scott-James gave Jenny wonderfully emotive eyes with CGI and Rob Zohrab’s matte painted backgrounds took it to another level altogether.
Next Perceptual Engineering Audio captured the charm and quirkiness of the script perfectly. And a very professional Betty Blood gave Jenny her voice.
Tom's short films and animations have won awards in New Zealand and Europe but this is his first work to screen at Annecy.
“We used a combination of techniques to make our animation really unique. We wanted people to look at it and think ‘how the heck have they done that?’”