Brown Bag Films are currently in production on a high profile 3D animation project and are looking for some highly skilled people to become key members of the development process. Do you have what it takes to be Brown Bag’s next top Modeler? Are you a 3D Texture Master? Is Character Rigging your bag?

To find out more about these roles  please email Aaron Healy and submit your CV and application form to jobs@brownbagfilms.com. 

We are accepting applications for the following:

Director

Audio Assistant

Work Experience

Storyboard Artist

3D  Modeler/Technical Director

3D Texture Artist/3D Animator

Photo by Danny Moloshok/Reuters

Sitting at the Oscars, 15 rows from the front, ‘we all just held hands in anticipation’ for ‘one of those moments when you clench the buttocks a little bit’, says ‘Granny O’Grimm’ nominee DARRAGH O’CONNELL 

NICKY PHELAN and myself had a fantastic night. There’s not a shred of disappointment about not getting the award, and we had a sense of people’s reactions at home from the amount of messages and goodwill we were getting. It was incredible.

But the best moment of the whole night was when we walked into the pub, Dylan’s, where all the Irish had gathered. When we arrived we had to walk up a big staircase, and as we did we got a huge cheer. People were coming in and out all night, and Richie Baneham came over, so everyone got to get a picture with the Oscar and to hold it.

Before the awards there were so many of us going that we didn’t have enough room in the limo, so myself and my wife Lina said we’d drive ourselves. But Richie had room in his limo, and we jumped in with him.

The red carpet was surreal. There are actually two red carpets, one for the stars and one for everyone else – where there are people ushering you, almost kicking you down it. But sometimes you just have to be pushy, so we told them we were nominated and they said it was no problem. So we walked down the star’s side, with Keanu Reeves and Matt Damon and all these people being interviewed. We could take our time.

It’s a lot of fun soaking up the atmosphere and watching the fans. Lina was really blown away by it. All of us men look the same, but it’s really about the girls, who looked great.

Inside, there’s really only time for one glass of champagne before the show starts. We had really good seats – about 15 rows from the stage – and a great view of everything. We were sitting with the cast of Avatar and could see everyone else, including Tomm Moore [director of The Secret of Kells ] and Richie.

At our award, we all just held hands in anticipation and the moment when they say “And the winner is . . . ” is just one of those moments when you clench the buttocks a little bit. The winner [ Logorama ] was a bit of surprise. It’s not that it’s not a good film – it is great – but it’s controversial, so it was a surprise in that sense. But to have got to the last five films is something we’re still really pleased with.

Afterwards, there was a party, the Governor’s Ball, that everyone goes to, but we were a bit starred-out at that stage, so we gave our tickets to a couple of others from Brown Bag and just went to Dylan’s. It was like walking into a surprise party. It was just great, because everyone has really got to know each other over the past week or so.

My brother was there and he had actually just snuck off to Las Vegas and got married. The joke was that he had stolen my thunder. But it was there to be stolen, and they were the toast of the night! We stayed there, because we were just burned out from the whole day.

Richie had invited us to the Fox party, and when you have an Oscar it gives you access to any party you want really, but – and I know this sounds strange – we’d seen enough stars. We stayed in Dylan’s until about 2.30am, but the party did go on well after we had left.

Paramount Pictures will feature ‘Granny’ before Neil Jordan’s latest film ‘Ondine’ starring Colin Farrell, and ‘Case 39′ starring Renee Zelwegger, released in cinemas nationwide this weekend.

‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’ is now also available to purchase on iTunes, so you can own it to watch whenever you feel the need for a bedtime story with a twist!

RTE TWO will also be airing the short film in advance of the Oscars on Sunday 7th March at 6:10pm.

After some research I bought the Canon 50mm f1.8., mainly because it was cheap and also it has a very shallow depth of field. This lens is a great portrait lens for that reason and is really fun to use. The following are some pictures I took of some of my work colleagues.

Brown Bag-style Portrait Photography

This picture is a perfect example of the lens at its smallest aperture. OK I didn’t take this (I’m in it) but its a great picture and really captures a moment. Mr Stacey, our technical director, took it.

Barry Lawless

I was in the studio last night taking some macro shots and barged into Dominic’s sound room. In return for letting me take some close ups of his mixing desk Dom asked me if I could take a few promo pictures of him. Since working on Granny O’Grimm his former college is doing a piece on him for their paper. I used the lights in the room as best I could and the screen makes for a perfect rim or side light, which really gives some nice highlights. If you look closely you can see that Dom’s fleece collar is not even in focus. This shows just how shallow the depth of field is at f1.8

Dominic Lawrence

This one I took of Steven O Connor, a texture artist who sits beside me at work. He was initially skeptical of my new lens until I took this picture. I think it works really well. There’s nice depth in it and also the natural light is giving form and colour to Mr O Connor. The expression is classic!

Stephen O'Connor

Brown Bag Up Close

I’m doing a course in Creative Photography and I had an assignment to produce 3 macro shots. Since I missed the field trip to the Botanical Gardens I decided to take some more pictures in Brown Bag. For this I borrowed a Canon macro extension tube which just clips on between the current lens and the body. The depth of field was so shallow that it was almost impossible to find the focus points.

Here are the shots I submitted. They are a bit sci-fi I must admit, but it’s interesting to see the place you work from a different point of view, which the macro photography forces you to do.

A section of Dominic's sound mixing desk

One of the many toys on Derek's desk

Another section of Dominic's desk

A couple of weeks ago, Team Granny O’Grimm’s Hollywood experience kicked off with the Oscar Nominees Luncheon. Each year, all the nominees and their guests attend a lunch and ceremony to acknowledge their nominations. Cathal took a few photos while they were there:

My mic-in-a-bottle method was out, mic-in-a-condom was in – remember kids, always practice safe sound design!  If you’ve watched any survival shoes like Ray Mears or Bear Grylls (I don’t but I’m sure they’ve mentioned it, I’m not making this stuff up I swear!) you’ll probably know that condoms are the best solution for keeping things like boxes of matches (or microphones) dry in a humid jungle environment.  Admittedly, underwater is a step further but it’s not much more than they are technically designed for…

So the setup this time was another expendable microphone (alas, it did not survive to see 2010…) and non-lubricated condoms (I fear linking to a manufacturer would be unwise considering Brown Bag’s target audience!).  Lastly i used elastic bands to attach gravel to the wire to stop it from floating to the surface.

Then it was back to the bath tub and, a bit like last time, using spoons (slotted and solid), cutlery of various sizes and whatever else was nearby to see what it sounded like.

And it sounded a bit like this….

Bubbles Underwater

Sinkhole gurgle

Swim strokes above water (processed)

Swim strokes underwater (processed)

Various movements underwater – raw

I recorded lots of mundane, but nonetheless useful, stuff like running water etc and I’m sure some it will come in handy, especially the gurgling for one episode of The Octonauts in particular…

So having plundered the ceramic wonders of Cork, I later found myself in Galway where my girlfriend’s sister (thanks Trish!) has a jacuzzi bath with jets – oh the possibilities!  Unfortunately i did not have all my various bits to record underwater so i had to keep everything dry (except when i lost concentration and accidentally let the mic take a swim…oops).

I got some pretty cool stuff from this as the jets were constantly causing variations.  By adjusting the water level you could vary the sound. eg. If you lowered the water level just in line with the jets, you got white water, if you submerged the jets, you got more dull, bubbly stuff.

Posh Bath: exposed jets of white water

Posh bath: submerged jets of bubbly current

Unfortunately, The Octonauts is still in production so there’s nothing to see at the moment  but with a bit of work, some of this stuff fits in nicely.

I also got some kinda cool snow/frosty footsteps from Ireland’s own ‘Day after Tomorrow’ storm so maybe this weather thing had its advantages!

Firstly, Where The Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze’s adaptation of the childrens book came up with a pretty novel way of reflecting the ‘young-at-heart’ sense of adventure in the voice records – and it makes pretty funny video too, kinda odd seeing Tony Soprano bouncing about the place!

And of course where would the world be without mash-ups so here’s Tony Soprano…as a Wild thing! Expect some swearing colourful language…

There’s a nice article here on how they transferred the lip sync and facial expressions onto the flat suits, probably not technical enough for a lot of ye but it worked for me.  Avatar recorded their dialog in a similar fashion to the wild things too, although i doubt it was as much fun as they were having…

Secondly, in Wes Anderson’s take on Roald Dahl’s classic Fantastic Mr Fox, he took a pretty stellar cast and put them in very unusual surroundings (for voice recording anyway…) – unconventional as it was,  it did seem to add a fun, animated, slightly ‘unhinged’ but nonetheless authentic quality to the voices.

Not sure how much bouncing around the place we’d manage in our VO booth but I’d sure love to give it a try…

Personally, I send and receive well over a hundred emails a day and find Email almost counter-productive as a communication tool. So this Intranet is a really big change in the way we work in here and hopefully everyone will adapt to it over the coming weeks and months. There are already a list of bugs so I will update you on the progress and the mistakes we will invariably make.  

As well as developing the intranet, over the past year we have been developing a bespoke 3D asset management system (when I say “we”, I really mean Darren Hyland who is at the heart of all of our technology R&D). This was done with our friends in Dominoworks who went above and beyond the brief and delivered a brilliant system for us which sits on our IBM servers. This new asset tracker allows us to manage a very sophisticated 3D pipeline and log every stage of the production process for the hundreds and thousands of 3D assets we work with. It has taken many incarnations and migraines before we arrived at Version 1.0 and we expect to have 2 major updates before the end of the year.

Brown Bag Films are in production on a high profile 3D animation project and are looking for some highly skilled people to become key members of the development process. We are currently looking for a Overseas Supervisor. We are looking for someone with minimum 5 years production experience,Supervising 3D animation from start to Post Production.

For more detailed information about the role please send your CV to Aaron Healy to jobs@brownbagfilms.com.