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Ask Us Anything #AMA





Every Thursday we're opening the studio doors and answering all of your questions. Technical, industry, fandom or otherwise - drop your question in the comments below - and we'll hop to it. (We're fielding Q's on Facebook, Twitter and G+ too, if that's easier!)

Excited? So are we!

First up we have Ceili Braidwood:

Well Ceili, we have just the answer for you! Storyboard Supervisor Damien O'Connor did up a whole post on advice for Storyboard Artists for our Tuesday TopTips which you can find here.

Here's a summary of Damien's advice:

Provide samples of storyboard work! If you have no actual storyboarding experience, storyboard anything at all – get a script offline and board a page, board a nursery rhyme, board a song, anything to show you understand the fundamentals. Just make sure you give a good long sequence and don't forget to include dialogue, action and scene numbers!

We don’t just want a literal translation of the written to the visual. The storyboards need to enhance what is on the page, they need to up the emotion, milk the laugh, push the excitement. Yes the drawings need to be clear enough to allow us to see who is who etc. but good storytelling is paramount!

So read all you can about the language of cinema, watch films to see what choices the director used to make a sequence work and board everything you can, keep at it until it looks right and tells a fluid story. Like every creative endeavour it can take years before you are an expert, but the joy is in the learning.

Hope that helps you in your pursuit!

Next up we have Darragh Browne who asked: Hi guys. I'm curious if you accept any unsolicited material for potential projects or do you solely develop in house productions? I'd love to hear your views on this topic. Thanks guys, kudos on years of quality work.

Thanks Darragh! We've passed your question onto our Development Producer Jennie Stacey:

Unfortunately for legal reasons we can only accept projects from outside our studio through recognised agents or other animation producers or broadcasters.

The simple reason for this is that it’s important that all copyright & ownership rights are cleared so that there’s no possibility of ending up with legal battles on our hands if someone submits a project similar to something we’re already developing. See here for industry examples of this!

We are also incredibly busy in our development team and have limited resources to review projects. We have to say ‘NO’ to far more projects than we can say ‘YES’ to, as we simply can’t do everything.

We develop a lot of projects in-house with members of the Brown Bag team. For short films, we only develop projects that come from our staff as our talented crew generate a lot of great ideas for films, for example Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty, Bird Food, Anya and our latest upcoming short An Ode To Love.

A good general tip if submitting projects to other studios or broadcasters is to have a very clear view of who your target audience is. For example, is it for pre-school children, or family audiences or boys aged 6-11? That way the person reviewing can quickly gauge if it’s something that could potentially fit well with their current development projects.

Hope that helps!

Hope that answers your question Darragh and remember you can check out our shorts on our YouTube channel!

The next question comes in from Thomas Brunkard:

Thanks for your question Thomas! We're happy to say that our alarm system seems to be all good now!

And to answer your other question, so far we've only ever received fan-fiction from our own shows! (But never say never…!)

We do love hearing from the fans, it brightens up our day when we get messages from parents or amazing doodles from kids!


Anahita Tabarsi

Anahita is Brown Bag Films' Marketing Director, Digital & Social and drinks more than five coffees a day...

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Brown Bag Labs is an exciting online space, brought to you by Brown Bag Films. We share great content for families as well as behind the scenes fun and tutorials from the Brown Bag Films team.