Animation company bags lucrative Noddy deal

Sunday Business Post - Done Deal page - Feb 15 2009

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Dublin animation company Brown Bag Films has secured a second international contract following its Olivia deal with US children’s TV channel Nickelodeon.

The Nickelodeon deal saw the first episode of a new Brown Bag animation series, based on the Olivia series of children’s novels by author Ian Falconer, broadcast last month.

Brown Bag bagged a hefty €6.2million production budget for the 52-episode series and is now working on another deal for a 52-part CGI animation series, Noddy in Toyland, for Chorion and British broadcaster Five.

‘‘Noddy is due to complete production by late summer, and we are currently in the final stages of contractual negotiation s wit h a global broadcaster for another project we hope to announce before then,” said Cathal Gaffney, managing director, Brown Bag.

Gaffney said the Olivia animation series, produced in high-definition CGI, would also air on television channels in Britain, Australia, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland.

Gaffney, who was also an executive producer of the series, said that the company worked hard to convince Nickelodeon of its credentials during the pitching process.

‘‘We did a series of tests on the show before we landed the job,” said Gaffney. ‘‘Olivia is a very big property outside of Europe, and lots of animation studios were keen to win the contract. Our creative approach and the vision of the director, Darragh O’Connell, secured the work for us.”

Gaffney said producer Gillian Higgins had been hired at the outset to oversee Brown Bag’s end of the project and liaise with US media giant Chorion, which held the rights to the award-winning Olivia book series.

‘‘Gillian joined us after working in the US for over 10 years, and her US broadcast experience made for relatively smooth sailing,” he said. “’Olivia took 14 months of production and over 80 people are credited. We worked extremely closely with Chorion at every step of the production.”

Gaffney said that the project, the company’s biggest so far, had required investment in some new equipment.

‘‘We produced and post-produced almost ten hours of high definition in 14 months, which brought huge technological challenges for us in terms of rendering, editing and storage,” he said.

Brown Bag is owned jointly by Gaffney and O’Connell, who set up the business in 1994. The company employs 50 staff across television commercial and production divisions based in Dublin and Toronto.

‘‘We have a slate of our own original television properties, as well as family feature films, in development,” said Gaffney. ‘‘A huge part of our business is about generating, producing and exploiting our own copyright internationally. One 2006 TV series, I’m an Animal, has sold to over 110 countries worldwide.”