Drifting Away
Louise Bagnall’s award-winning short Late Afternoon paints a poignant picture of an older woman with dementia.
When Irish animator Louise Bagnall was a young girl, she witnessed her parents taking care of her aging grandparents, who seemed to be slowly losing their faculties. A few years ago, she began to read and watch documentaries about dementia, and while her grandparents didn’t suffer from that disease, she realized that they had similar symptoms.
“As a child, I didn’t really understand the problem, and I thought they were just my grandparents who were getting old,” Bagnall says during a recent phone interview. “It was years later as an adult that I really understood what was going on.”
Her interest in the subject led her to start sketching ideas for depicting the various stages of a woman’s life. “I
was just collecting these ideas in an abstract way, and then, in 2016, I tried to get funding to develop the idea as a short, it all came together.” The result is Late Afternoon, a moving animated short which has won several awards and been showcased in over 60 festivals around the world over the past year.
Bagnall, who is a creative director at Kilkenny-based studio Cartoon Saloon and has worked as a character designer on Puffin Rock and The Breadwinner and storyboard artist on the upcoming feature Wolfwalkers, is also the assistant director on Nora Twomey’s upcoming Netflix movie My Father’s Dragon. “Everyone at Cartoon Saloon was very supportive of the short, and my producer, Nuria Blanco, came on board, and together we put in the submission to get the funding from the Irish Film Board’s shorts initiative program Frameworks.”
Bagnall began producing the short in September of 2016 and finished it a year later. She used TVPaint software for character animation (as do most of the Cartoon Saloon projects) and Photoshop for textures and to get the watercolor look, and Adobe After Effects for compositing.
“Once you finish the short, there’s a quiet period when you’re just submitting it to festivals, and then we started to get into a lot of festival in the beginning of the year,” she notes.“Being featured at the Tribeca festival was brilliant, and winning the prize for best animated short was
even better, because it helped us place the film in even more festivals.”
The talented animator says she’s been especially moved by how audiences react to her short after screenings. “It’s been quite special to have people come to me individually and tell me about a parent or grandparent who has dementia. I didn’t necessarily expect that to happen, and it also showed me how many people have someone in their lives facing this issue.”
Early Influences
As a young girl growing up in Dublin, Bagnall watched a lot of British animated shows such as the popular stop-motion series The Clangers. “It wasn’t until I was a teenager when I finally saw anime and it blew my mind,”
she says. “Some of my other favorites included Disney films like The Lion King, and I was also a big fan of comic books by people like Scott Morse and Jamie Hewlett.”
Looking back at her education (she studied animation at the Institute of Art, Design + Technology in Dublin) and impressive career, Bagnall says she’s glad she was open to all possibilities and that she traveled to different countries after she finished her studies.“What I tell animation students is that there are more options out there for you than you realize,” she says. “It’s good to spend time figuring out what you like to do and enjoy. Try different areas to see which best suits your talents. For me, working in Germany was amazing and gave me more insight. Young people shouldn’t be afraid to leave their country and explore other places, because even if it doesn’t work out, they can always return back home.”
She is also quite proud of what Irish studios such as Cartoon Saloon, Brown Bag and others have accomplished in recent years. “The Irish animation boom has been amazing since we’re a small country in terms of size and population,” Bagnall notes, “but our government has been very supportive and has helped the industry grow so much in the past 10 years.”
Bagnall says she really loves playing in the short animation field. “Some stories fit the format best!” she points out. “You can be more expressive. It’s definitely a great way to tell personal stories, and it suits the modern age well, because you can put them online and people can easily find time for a 10-minute short. Not every idea should be a feature film!”
You can learn more at louisebagnall.tumblr.com.
‘It’s been quite special to have people tell me about a parent or grandparent who has dementia. I didn’t necessarily expect that to happen, and it also showed me how many people have someone in their lives facing this issue.’ — Writer and director Louise Bagnall
Newt’s New Pet: The team at Framestore helped bring the gigantic Chinese cat-dragon Zouwu to life for the movie. While the creature is just like a big kitten to Newt, it had to look both realistic and terrifying to most humans around it.
elements. She had been held captive in this magical circus and all of the creatures found there are poor examples of their kind.”
As usual, the process involved some tricky moments of marrying the CG with the live-action plates. “We had some shots where Newt rides the Zouwu like a jockey and one when she picks Newt up and affectionately plays with him like a toy. Puppeteers were on set covered in green pretending to be this largerthan-life creature. We also had an assortment of props, such as a head that was the correct size and a softer sponge version that Eddie could touch. We were constrained by the performance of Eddie in the plate. When Newt was riding on her back we would retain as much of his performance all the way through to replacing him entirely.”
Size and scale were also an issue for the Chinese dragon. “We realized that she didn’t fit in the actual set for the [Ministère des Affaires Magiques] where a great escape takes place,” remarks McConnel. “You can imagine how long Zouwu is and her long tail could easily start intercepting with all of the background. We scaled it down so she could be able to fit in that set.”
McConnel says he recalls being on set when they were shooting a sequence where Newt befriends the dragon. “He gets a toy to distract the Zouwu from what she’s doing to get her out of harm’s way. David Yates was saying, ‘You need to fill the frame.’ Luckily with the tail that long we’re able to use it as a device to give us depth.”
That scene turned out to be a personal favorite. “She’s this big fearsome creature that is scared herself. Everybody is running away from her, cars are crashing, she is unintentionally causing havoc, but then there’s this person who stands in front of her and pulls out this fluffy toy that absolutely mesmerizes her. The Zouwu is like a little kitten in the way that she follows the toy into Newt’s suitcase. It’s quite comical and embodies the qualities of Newt.”
Feline Parisian Guards
Ethereal cat-like creatures known as Matagots serve as security guards for the French Ministry of Magic. “They’re quite mysterious, gaunt, angular and aggressive looking,” states McConnel. “The Matagots have these gnarly finger poses and unusual eyes. They’re based on a Sphinx reference. We looked at cat runs and walks. The quality that we were looking for was a stalking predator-like quality. If you try to hit them with a spell they’ll multiply. We use their ears to make them feel slightly different but they’re almost like clones. They’ve got a pack mentality like wolves, and the way they hunt is to distract from the front while attacking from the back at the same time.”
Several other new characters are also introduced as part of the circus. “The Oni is like a huge Japanese sumo wrestler gladiator gorilla with delicate claws,” remarks McConnel. “In the same tent is an amphibious creature called a Kappa that lives in a bath that has a cup-shaped head full of water, and in a cage are the Firedrakes which are these little sparking dragons. David Yates was keen to have a social structure feeling. We came up with a fun beat where the Firedrakes are mischievously trying to antagonise the Kappa, the Kappa is taking it like this is happening to him all of the time, and the Oni rattles the cage or grabs one of the Firedrakes. It has a nice family quality.”
Another big vfx task involved replacing the practical set for the Ministère des Affaires Magiques with many digital shots. “Sometimes it was easier because we were filling the set with shelves,” states McConnel. “We had a series of domes that are connected. Depending on the angle you can see into multiple domes. We had some key concepts that came from the client that they wanted us to achieve. Things are slowly shifting in the background to make sure that environment has a magical quality.”
Paris and London in the 1920s are the principal settings.“The big thing with London was the smog and mist,” says McConnel. “There was a lot of compositing work. We added quite a lot of pigeons in there from an animation perspective. They’re hard to see when you’re viewing them in a lower resolution. We did do one render where we saw this pigeon making a break for it!”
Looking back, McDonnel believes the Zouwu to be the biggest challenge.“It’s one of the few creatures that has a narrative arc across the film. Our relationship to her as well as with Newt keeps changing throughout the film. Making sure that we got the Zouwu right was a challenge for every department.”
Warner Bros.’ Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is currently playing in theaters in most territories.