CBBC's Pedro and Frankensheep are screening as part of the official programme at Annecy 2008. The episode selected is 'Fool Moon' which sees Pedro and Frank fiddling with the tides with disastrous consequences. The series was created by Phil Cooper at the BBC. We directed and co-wrote the episodes, with Greg designing the look, and me doing the voices of Frank and Hugo. We also wrote the music. Watch an episode on YouTube now or nine of the ten at CBBC.
Harry and Toto is a pre-school series created by Paul Shuttleworth at Handle and Spout productions. It's based on Aesop's fable about the Tortoise and the Hare and has been airing on Cbeebies since early June 2008. I was lucky enough to write several episodes for the show. It was great fun to work on and that seems to have been the feeling of everyone who worked on it... I met several of them at the launch party including Liz who wrote the music and Bob Golding who did all the male voices. Here's a clip...
A recent visitor to our YouTube site requested we publish the transcripts from the Spamland films... so here they are.
Spamland#1 email transcript, taken from an email selling Viagra, Cialis and the rest. From Xochiquetzal Gerow. Sent: 05 October 2006 12:18
nodded. The door was closed and sealed again. Quietly forward. Hands extended, fingers lightly bowed. Iron John was Thats why there is no record of them
Spamland#2 email transcript, taken from a HTML email selling OEM software. The plain text version of the email included the following. From Arthur Smith. Sent 30 October 2006 05:14
In a gravitation without warning the face of rubbing grew sullen Black angry mouths, the clouds swallowed up the horsehair The air was religion with suppressed excitement The walk howled through the solidness and sobbed and calfskin in the secret of the desperado The chime of the threads bell flowed out into the jawline The course notes the holy chant thursday with the storm like refreshingly angels with Satan At last the likenesses of investments lay vanquished. The composure paused in its course to do careening to God. jehovah however aabruptness clap of thunder smote the sky The lane chime of the prints off with a a cradled dissonance Demons seemed the brethren breastworks chilling with gleaming eyes and trembling acidly the militant army of Godswept up unchaste stairs mumbling the ritual of the percy Infected boatswain by the matching hysteria Aubrey openair of the fiftypound Unearthly noises like a incorrect parody of the holy sand that marks the elevation of the backward alarmed the ears the octave monks unspeakable blasphemies streak with to dropoff Rain came down delicatessen cataract napkins of lightning chased one comp like battling fiery dragons. freak jangled hideously out of urgent cheaper and pressed experiment The caravaggio through issues more then latently and rubbed both notched
Spamland#3 email transcript, from an email received by a Bristol University departmental group. From Moi Hoffmann. Sent: 01 May 2007 23:00
Subject: The forest was moving. Body of text: She is in Mushroom--the last classroom along that passage.
The finished animations from the Digitoons Masterclass that we have been involved in courtesy of Hi8us Midlands are now live on YouTube. They will have their first performance at today's Hello Digital festival in Birmingham.
Congratulations to our six animators Nusha Amini, Lauron Farr, Qianqian Liu, Charis McNerlin, Amy Morgan, and Charlie Pinder of mookstudios. Thanks to Kate, Dave and Kulwant at Hi8us for organising everything!
Tate recently commissioned The Brothers McLeod to make five short films for their fantastic Tate Kids website. Each episode is part animation, part live action, featuring the two headed Orthus who disagrees with himself about the merits of each artwork he sees. Watch the first film here at the Tate Kids site, or watch the taster from our YouTube channel below.
Two more of our Art Sparks films for the Tate Kids website are now ready to watch. If you missed the first one it's available at the Tate Kids site, or on YouTube.
Here's an interactive sitcom called The Houseguest from some friends. We first met Alexander Perkins on a shoot for a Stena Line commercial. We liked him and his voice so much that we asked him to work on a Sex Education project that we wrote and directed in 2008 (more about that another time). I also met Ruth up at the Edinburgh Fringe when Alex and her were performing in the awesome Mrs Wobble the Waitress! Each section of the Houseguest ends with a section where you can choose two options for how the story continues... what choices will you make?
Mondo Media of Happy Tree Friends fame were kind enough to approach us and ask if they could distribute our content on their web channels. Fuggy Fuggy has just been released on their Minishows website and YouTube channel and already has almost 50,000 views in just two days. Great news!
This is one of four films produced to highlight the excellent work of the Law Centres. We made two of the films (the other one will feature on the blog and on our YouTube page eventually). The other two films were made by top illustrator Chris Haughton. You can see his film Maureen's Story at the Law Centres YouTube channel.
I don’t want to go on about the BAFTA thing (yeah! BAFTA BAFTA BAFTA), but while at the 2009 film BAFTAs, when we were nominated for a BAFTA at the BAFTAs, we met fellow BAFTA nominees (and former BAFTA winners) Marc Craste and Sue Goffe from the amazing BAFTA winning studio aka.
This year wasn’t our year because the legendary Nick Park was out and about and claimed the gong for Wallace and Gromit. But it did mean we’d got to commiserate with Marc and Sue and a little while later they asked to work with them on a project.
The Law Centres Federation runs centres around the UK which are not-for-profit legal practices providing free legal advice and representation to disadvantaged people. They wanted four short animations to explain what they did in a short and engaging way. So we worked on two of them and the very talented illustrator Chris Haughton worked on the others (you can see one on his YouTube channel).
We made one of the films in a style similar to our short film Codswallop. But for the other, we thought we’d have a go at something new. We’d had an idea about animating some fabric models and so, once we'd picked our story - about a family man overcoming a drug addition and volunteering at a law centre to get his life back on track - Greg starting sketching.
We then brought in friend and designer Asia Werbel of Colourspace to turn the sketches and illustrations into fabric models. She also created a fabric background complete with patchwork houses and button trees.
The finished models and background look fantastic and personally I think it creates a magical looking animated film. You can buy some of Asia’s handmade plushes and other designs on Etsy or at Uneeka.
The rest of the crew included the very talented animator Tom Evans, Paul Johnston from Rhythm Studios and the voiceovers for all the films came from Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty.
We're very pleased to announce that we've won the NHS Choices and Creative Review Health Cartoon Competition with our entry The Tokkels. The other four finalists all produced brilliant animations so there was some seriously stiff competition (you can watch them all on YouTube).
Our prize is a six month contract to work with NHS Choices to develop The Tokkels for them.
Hooray!
If you missed it before... here's the thread and the animation:
A while ago we were fortunate enough to be shortlisted for the NHS Choices / Creative Review competition. The final 'test' animations have all now been released, but here's ours - we wanted to keep it short and sweet with a twist of humour and minimal or no dialogue.
If you like it, then please leave your comments on the NHS Choices website or at Creative Review. Thanks. TBM.
We recently received a call from Aaron Simpson, the man behind Cold Hard Flash, on behalf of Mondo Media. Over the last year Mondo have been showing our Fuggy cartoons and they've had hundreds of thousands of views there...
Aaron wanted to find out if we'd be happy to make some new Fuggy episodes. It's been three years since Fuggy last karate chopped his way onto the internet, but at last he's back. We've made five new minute long episodes which will appear over the next few weeks.
The first episode is entitled Thrift and can be seen on Mondo's YouTube channel.
The third of five new Fuggys is available to view at Mondo Media's YouTube Channel. In this episode Fuggy makes a new friend... his female counterpart 'Figgy'.
So it’s a new year and a new decade. We’ve just finished our new short film The Moon Bird and here we are twiddling our thumbs with nothing to do. Er… or not.
Among the projects we have on the go is one we created from scratch ourselves. We’re producing a short series for BBC Comedy Extra called Sticks.
Sticks first came about a couple of years ago when Greg (the illustrator-animator half of The Brothers McLeod) drew some characters on the coffee stirrers our Dad supplies at Ripplecups.com.
We had the idea of trying to do some ad lib stuff using the sticks as puppets. We recorded a bunch of off-the-cuff sketches onto our naff video camera and tried to make each other laugh. A lot of it was incomprehensible, but some funny characters did emerge. Our favourites were a collection of bungling Cockney coppers and some ridiculous French private detectives.
So last year we put together a proposal for some scripted episodes, featuring the policemen, and sent them off to Martin Trickey and Simon Lupton at BBC Comedy. They were good enough to press the big red GO button and now we’re in production. We’ll be blogging about the production process so watch out for more.
There are already three existing Sticks animations that show the potential for this kind of animation. They feature a man whose house is set on fire, some ghostly cowboys and a tragic bear. You can watch them here:
Spamland#1 email transcript, taken from an email selling Viagra, Cialis and the rest. From Xochiquetzal Gerow. Sent: 05 October 2006 12:18
In a gravitation without warning the face of rubbing grew sullen Black angry mouths, the clouds swallowed up the horsehair The air was religion with suppressed excitement The walk howled through the solidness and sobbed and calfskin in the secret of the desperado The chime of the threads bell flowed out into the jawline The course notes the holy chant thursday with the storm like refreshingly angels with Satan At last the likenesses of investments lay vanquished. The composure paused in its course to do careening to God. jehovah however aabruptness clap of thunder smote the sky The lane chime of the prints off with a a cradled dissonance Demons seemed the brethren breastworks chilling with gleaming eyes and trembling acidly the militant army of Godswept up unchaste stairs mumbling the ritual of the percy Infected boatswain by the matching hysteria Aubrey openair of the fiftypound Unearthly noises like a incorrect parody of the holy sand that marks the elevation of the backward alarmed the ears the octave monks unspeakable blasphemies streak with to dropoff Rain came down delicatessen cataract napkins of lightning chased one comp like battling fiery dragons. freak jangled hideously out of urgent cheaper and pressed experiment The caravaggio through issues more then latently and rubbed both notched
Spamland#3 email transcript, from an email received by a Bristol University departmental group. From Moi Hoffmann. Sent: 01 May 2007 23:00
I don’t want to go on about the BAFTA thing (yeah! BAFTA BAFTA BAFTA), but while at the 2009 film BAFTAs, when we were nominated for a BAFTA at the BAFTAs, we met fellow BAFTA nominees (and former BAFTA winners) Marc Craste and Sue Goffe from the amazing BAFTA winning 
We had the idea of trying to do some ad lib stuff using the sticks as puppets. We recorded a bunch of off-the-cuff sketches onto our naff video camera and tried to make each other laugh. A lot of it was incomprehensible, but some funny characters did emerge. Our favourites were a collection of bungling Cockney coppers and some ridiculous French private detectives.
