PPP- Summer Internship at Paper Owl Films

Last August, shortly before starting university again, I was on a three week internship at Paper Owl Films in Holywood County Down, working in the Art Department on a show for Cbeebies called Pablo, which was about a young boy with Autism who created a fantasy world to escape to with his drawings. For most of the two weeks I spent at Paper Owl I was tasked with creating rough sketches for background assets in Photoshop, referring to storyboards and the scripts, highlighting any props or individual assets which were missing from the prop list and providing sketches for the animators use as reference.

Excerpts from the Design Bible for Pablo (Used with permission)

This being a 30+ episode television project for the BBC, I had to work within a very strictly defined art style, outlined by the art director in the design bible, a document which specified almost every stage of the design process, from the types of brushes I needed to use to the do’s and don’ts as to how to approach drawing certain props and what colours to use. The experience of working on Pablo helped me appreciate and understand how small studios such as Paper Owl function, and the skills I would need to develop to get a job working on a project like this in the future.

While I was on internship at Paper Owl Films I attended a monthly networking event in Belfast, in which animators from all over Northern Ireland, from students to major industry figures, mingle and network over drinks. Attendees included employees of Sixteen-South, an animation company based in Belfast which has worked on a number of Children’s programmes for television, including Lily’s Driftwood Bay and Sesame Street; and Dog Ears, a Derry based company which has collaborated with Cartoon Saloon in the past on shows such as Nick Jr’s Puffin Rock. Throughout the night I talked to a number of people who worked at these studios, exchanging business cards and contact information. Both Sixteen-South and Dog Ears seemed to specialise in children’s animation for television with a focus on art/asset creation, which is what I had been doing on my Internship at Paper Owl and what I would say was my main area of interest at that moment in time.