ALMOST 10-million people watched Stick Man, a collaboration between Cape Town’s Triggerfish Animation Studios and London-based Magic Light Studios, on BBC One on Christmas Day.
It is one of several highlights of the studio established 20 years ago, with the most notable others being the animated feature films Adventures in Zambezia (2010) and Khumba (2013). Both films have been translated into more than 25 languages and have together generated $75m in gross revenues.
Last year, the company won the Western Cape Premier’s Entrepreneurship Recognition Awards.
"It’s hard to imagine numbers as big as 9.27-million people, but it was great to be told that we were more popular than the Queen’s speech," says Triggerfish CEO Stuart Forrest.
Animation, he says, is an avenue to shifting the way in which the world perceives SA. "We can’t allow the news media to be the sole distributor of images of SA," says Forrest. "We want people who watch our stuff to sit up and say, ‘Oh, it’s family-friendly and fun’."
While making own-concept feature-length films such as Adventures in Zambezia is what makes Triggerfish staff happiest, working on commission, as with Stick Man, brings in the bacon.
It is also how Triggerfish got into the film industry.
In 1996, the company started out as a boutique stop-frame animation studio, switching to computer animation in 2007 because of technological improvements in hardware and software.
"For the first decade, our biggest client was Sesame Street," says Forrest.
Triggerfish used local art — plastic chickens, wire animals and so on — in its stop-motion animation creations. In the stop-motion animation technique, people physically manipulate objects in small increments between individually photographed frames, so that when the frames are played as a sequence, the illusion of movement is created.
Examples are the 2000 movie Chicken Run, produced by Aardman with DreamWorks and the British animated film Wallace and Gromit, by Aardman Animations.
From 1998 to 2008, Triggerfish produced stop-frame animation for Sesame Workshop for the South African version of the pre-school children’s programme Sesame Street, Takalani Sesame. The studio also made the US domestic and global versions of the series.
"I still love stop animation," says Forrest. "You can do amazing things with it, but computer animation just felt like the future."
Being awarded the contract to create animation for Sesame Street was a real stepping stone for Triggerfish. "(It) set us apart and gave us international credibility," says Forrest. Twenty years down the line, Triggerfish has a wide reach, with its work now in the hands of more than 60 film distributors across the globe.
...
FORREST joined Triggerfish in 2002 as a junior animator. It was still owned by founders Jacquie Trowell and Emma Kaye. In 2004, he and James Middleton became partners in Triggerfish and in 2005, they became the sole partners when Trowell and Kaye left. In 2007, they "reformatted" the company, switching to computer animation. It was around then that the studio also started working on its own scripts "informed by what we see around us", says Forrest.
"Now we do both premium service work (on commission) and writing our own scripts. It was always a Triggerfish vision to not be totally reliant on service. Now we can empower local artists to express their talent and change impressions of SA the world over."
But creating a feature-length film is expensive in time and effort — Forrest reckons it takes three years to develop a script properly, and two-and-a-half to complete its animation. That’s before actors voice characters, and musicians provide a sound track.
A career highlight, he says, was "watching the first screening of Zambezia in the cinema at Skywalker Sound the day the sound was finished, and realising the movie actually worked".
Skywalker Sound is the Los Angeles, California sound effects, sound-editing, sound-design, sound-mixing and music-recording division of George Lucas’s Lucas Digital motion picture group.
Stick Man was made in collaboration with London-based production company Magic Light Studios, whose co-founder Michael Rose worked on Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit.
The animations are true to the style of the original illustrations by Julia Donaldson’s longtime collaborator, Axel Scheffler, most famous for The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child. Magic Light Studios received an Oscar and a Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) nomination for its Gruffalo films.
Rose says working with Triggerfish on Stick Man, the most complex of the Donaldson-Scheffler 30-minute films Magic Light Pictures has made, was "absolutely fantastic". The firms are again collaborating, on Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, for the BBC for the end of this year.
"I got to know Stuart (Forrest) through Zambezia and Khumba, which are astonishingly great pieces of work. Stick Man seemed a natural fit, Triggerfish is extremely good at CGI (computer-generated imagery) animation. We at Magic Light Pictures are obsessed with quality," he says.
Rose said Magic Light looked to the Cape Town studio because, while the previous Donaldson-Scheffler films — Stick Man was the fourth — were made in Europe, production costs there were escalating. In SA, there was a tax credit of about 20% of spend in SA, the favourable exchange rate (even two years ago), and the talent.
...
THAT fits well with one of Triggerfish’s more recent developments, Triggerfish Story Lab, which aims to develop young African writers and directors over an 18-month period, the goal being the introduction of their work to the global market. The enterprise is supported by Disney and SA’s Department of Trade and Industry.
"We are excited by all the untapped talent around the continent," says Forrest. "There is very little opportunity for animation in Africa, which is a pity, because it is easier to cross boundaries with it than with live-action film."
Forrest says the focus is outside Africa, because 0.6% of Triggerfish’s gross income comes from Africa.
"We can’t build a business around this continent. Although we expect this to change over the next 10 years when someone figures out how to make content for Africa and monetise it."
The problems distributing film in Africa range from piracy being "completely ignored, there is no enforcement of copyright" to the fees television has to pay to licence film being low.
"SA is probably the only emerging-market country where the animation industry is focused outwards," he says.
• The African premiere of Stick Man takes place at the Cape Town International Animation Festival on February 19 at The Labia Theatre at 11h30.
-
Cape Town-based animation studio Triggerfish created Stick Man in collaboration with London-based Magic Light Studios. The animated version of the children’s book was screened on BBC One. Picture: © ORANGE EYES LIMITED 2015
-
Triggerfish CEO Stuart Forrest says being awarded the contract for children’s television series Sesame Street was a real stepping stone for the company. Picture: SUPPLIED
ALMOST 10-million people watched Stick Man, a collaboration between Cape Town’s Triggerfish Animation Studios and London-based Magic Light Studios, on BBC One on Christmas Day.
It is one of several highlights of the studio established 20 years ago, with the most notable others being the animated feature films Adventures in Zambezia (2010) and Khumba (2013). Both films have been translated into more than 25 languages and have together generated $75m in gross revenues.
Last year, the company won the Western Cape Premier’s Entrepreneurship Recognition Awards.
"It’s hard to imagine numbers as big as 9.27-million people, but it was great to be told that we were more popular than the Queen’s speech," says Triggerfish CEO Stuart Forrest.
Animation, he says, is an avenue to shifting the way in which the world perceives SA. "We can’t allow the news media to be the sole distributor of images of SA," says Forrest. "We want people who watch our stuff to sit up and say, ‘Oh, it’s family-friendly and fun’."
While making own-concept feature-length films such as Adventures in Zambezia is what makes Triggerfish staff happiest, working on commission, as with Stick Man, brings in the bacon.
It is also how Triggerfish got into the film industry.
In 1996, the company started out as a boutique stop-frame animation studio, switching to computer animation in 2007 because of technological improvements in hardware and software.
"For the first decade, our biggest client was Sesame Street," says Forrest.
Triggerfish used local art — plastic chickens, wire animals and so on — in its stop-motion animation creations. In the stop-motion animation technique, people physically manipulate objects in small increments between individually photographed frames, so that when the frames are played as a sequence, the illusion of movement is created.
Examples are the 2000 movie Chicken Run, produced by Aardman with DreamWorks and the British animated film Wallace and Gromit, by Aardman Animations.
From 1998 to 2008, Triggerfish produced stop-frame animation for Sesame Workshop for the South African version of the pre-school children’s programme Sesame Street, Takalani Sesame. The studio also made the US domestic and global versions of the series.
"I still love stop animation," says Forrest. "You can do amazing things with it, but computer animation just felt like the future."
Being awarded the contract to create animation for Sesame Street was a real stepping stone for Triggerfish. "(It) set us apart and gave us international credibility," says Forrest. Twenty years down the line, Triggerfish has a wide reach, with its work now in the hands of more than 60 film distributors across the globe.
...
FORREST joined Triggerfish in 2002 as a junior animator. It was still owned by founders Jacquie Trowell and Emma Kaye. In 2004, he and James Middleton became partners in Triggerfish and in 2005, they became the sole partners when Trowell and Kaye left. In 2007, they "reformatted" the company, switching to computer animation. It was around then that the studio also started working on its own scripts "informed by what we see around us", says Forrest.
"Now we do both premium service work (on commission) and writing our own scripts. It was always a Triggerfish vision to not be totally reliant on service. Now we can empower local artists to express their talent and change impressions of SA the world over."
But creating a feature-length film is expensive in time and effort — Forrest reckons it takes three years to develop a script properly, and two-and-a-half to complete its animation. That’s before actors voice characters, and musicians provide a sound track.
A career highlight, he says, was "watching the first screening of Zambezia in the cinema at Skywalker Sound the day the sound was finished, and realising the movie actually worked".
Skywalker Sound is the Los Angeles, California sound effects, sound-editing, sound-design, sound-mixing and music-recording division of George Lucas’s Lucas Digital motion picture group.
Stick Man was made in collaboration with London-based production company Magic Light Studios, whose co-founder Michael Rose worked on Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit.
The animations are true to the style of the original illustrations by Julia Donaldson’s longtime collaborator, Axel Scheffler, most famous for The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child. Magic Light Studios received an Oscar and a Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) nomination for its Gruffalo films.
Rose says working with Triggerfish on Stick Man, the most complex of the Donaldson-Scheffler 30-minute films Magic Light Pictures has made, was "absolutely fantastic". The firms are again collaborating, on Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, for the BBC for the end of this year.
"I got to know Stuart (Forrest) through Zambezia and Khumba, which are astonishingly great pieces of work. Stick Man seemed a natural fit, Triggerfish is extremely good at CGI (computer-generated imagery) animation. We at Magic Light Pictures are obsessed with quality," he says.
Rose said Magic Light looked to the Cape Town studio because, while the previous Donaldson-Scheffler films — Stick Man was the fourth — were made in Europe, production costs there were escalating. In SA, there was a tax credit of about 20% of spend in SA, the favourable exchange rate (even two years ago), and the talent.
...
THAT fits well with one of Triggerfish’s more recent developments, Triggerfish Story Lab, which aims to develop young African writers and directors over an 18-month period, the goal being the introduction of their work to the global market. The enterprise is supported by Disney and SA’s Department of Trade and Industry.
"We are excited by all the untapped talent around the continent," says Forrest. "There is very little opportunity for animation in Africa, which is a pity, because it is easier to cross boundaries with it than with live-action film."
Forrest says the focus is outside Africa, because 0.6% of Triggerfish’s gross income comes from Africa.
"We can’t build a business around this continent. Although we expect this to change over the next 10 years when someone figures out how to make content for Africa and monetise it."
The problems distributing film in Africa range from piracy being "completely ignored, there is no enforcement of copyright" to the fees television has to pay to licence film being low.
"SA is probably the only emerging-market country where the animation industry is focused outwards," he says.
• The African premiere of Stick Man takes place at the Cape Town International Animation Festival on February 19 at The Labia Theatre at 11h30.
Change: -0.42%
Change: -0.35%
Change: -0.17%
Change: 0.14%
Change: -2.58%
Data supplied by Profile Data
Change: -0.56%
Change: 0.13%
Change: -0.42%
Change: 0.00%
Change: -0.18%
Data supplied by Profile Data
Change: 2.51%
Change: 1.47%
Change: 2.57%
Change: 3.09%
Change: 1.90%
Data supplied by Profile Data
Change: -0.26%
Change: -0.10%
Change: -0.52%
Change: 0.00%
Change: -1.94%
Data supplied by Profile Data