Cartoon network
Ballyfermot College’s Oscars alumni pave way for next generation
DOUBLE Oscar winner Richard Baneham is helping students at his Dublin alma mater to realise their dreams of working in the film industry one day.
The visual effects guru – who has won a pair of Academy Awards for his work on the two Avatar blockbuster movies – will be honoured again at the Oscar Wilde Awards next month.
And this latest award will be celebrated as yet another win for his old college, Ballyfermot College of Further Education, described as a ‘hotbed’ for emerging film industry talent.
The west Dublin institute has been a breeding ground for Irish creative media talent now making waves around the world, particularly – though not exclusively – for the likes of animation pioneers such as Baneham.
The Dubliner’s fellow Ballyfermot alumni founded Cartoon Saloon and Brown Bag Films – multi-Oscar nominated animation studios based in Kilkenny and Dublin respectively.
Baneham will be one of three honourees at this year’s Oscar Wilde Awards, an annual bash put on by the US-Ireland Alliance ahead of the Oscars.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday there ‘wasn’t a clear path’ for becoming an animator in Ireland when he started college in the early 90s, but said there was ‘a great expectation for being able to do whatever you wanted when you came out of college’.
‘There were all sorts of possibilities opening up.’
His college contemporaries and friends Darragh O’Connell and Cathal Gaffney started Brown Bag Films in 1994. Nominated for Oscars for Give Up Yer Aul Sins in 2001 and Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty in 2011, the studio’s 3D-animated take on Peter Rabbit won six Daytime Emmy awards. A little later, Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey and Paul Young established Cartoon Saloon in 1999. The studio now has five Oscar nods under its belt, with The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014), The Breadwinner (2017) and Wolfwalkers (2020) all being nominated for best animated feature and Late Afternoon (2017) receiving a nod for best animated short. About the early days, Moore told the MoS: ‘All three founders of Cartoon Saloon met in Ballyfermot in the late 1990s and for the first years of the studio everyone working there was a graduate of Ballyfermot.’
The Newryborn filmmaker said the hands-on courses there were ‘the foundation of our careers and our success’.
‘The friendships and partnerships started there continue to this day,’ he said, adding that alumni ‘all have fond memories of our time there.’
And Moore said the college, which mainly offers art and creative media courses but also teaches business and health courses is still ‘a hotbed of talent’.
Ballyfermot’s principal Cecilia Munro said ‘quite a lot’ of their graduates now work for the two successful animation studios, as well as on Baneham’s team in Los Angeles.
‘Those are the people who work behind the scenes to help you take your vision and put it into practice,’ she told the MoS. ‘A lot of them came through Ballyfermot.’ Filmmaker Laura McGann, whose documentary The Deepest Breath became a worldwide hit last year on Netflix, is another graduate of the college.
And Jillian Beecher, who studied cinematography and film at Ballyfermot, has now gone on to find work as a production artist on some of the biggest films of recent years.
She worked on three of the five nominees for Production Design at last year’s Oscars – Babylon, Elvis, and Avatar: The Way of Water.
Ms Munro pointed out that ‘not everyone is going to win an Oscar or an Emmy or a top producer’s award’ but said Ballyfermot graduates are ‘well placed to be part of a team that supports that person’. The school prides itself on a multidisciplinary approach across most of its courses and its close ties to the creative media industry.
‘The creative arts industry in Ireland has just taken off,’ she said. ‘It’s booming. You have all these new TV and film studios. The music scene in Ireland, particularly for traditional Irish music, has exploded too.
‘But the key message that’s coming through from any of our alumni that have won any awards, whether it’s an Oscar an Emmy or first prize in a local art competition, is that the college just helps you develop as a creator.’
It’s shaping up to be another exciting night for the Irish at the Oscars in March, with Corkman Cillian Murphy favourite to land Best Actor for his performance in Oppenheimer.
And Poor Things, produced by Irish company Element Pictures, is in the running for 11 awards, with Dubliner Robbie Ryan among these for his cinematography on Yorgos Lanthimos’s comedy.
‘There were all sorts of possibilities opening up’