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Thanks for talking to us Dan. Can you tell us a bit more about Giant?

Alex Sherwood, Ben Harper, Sean Mullen and myself launched Giant in 2012, providing animated services to advertising agencies and other animation companies.

We started winning awards for our work; especially for our flagship short film 'The Last Train' which was nominated for an IFTA, received an official selection in Annecy [The Annecy International Animation Film Festival] and won a Digital Media Award in 2012. Our reputation grew and so did our ambitions and ideas on what we wanted to accomplish.

Since then we’ve continued to provide service work for clients (winning a Digital Media Award in 2013 for 'Best work for Animation and Television'), and have been creating our own content. We recently collaborated with Sir Terry Pratchett and the Animation Hub to write and make a Discworld short film called 'The Duel', which will be going around the short film circuit for the next year.

More recently, we've started moving into the interactive marketplace, providing animation services for games as well as starting to build interactive content for our own I.P.

The Duel. Photo: Giant Animation Studios

Where’s the Irish animation industry at?

It’s doing well. Irish companies are definitely making a mark on the international market which is a positive story and we intend to keep this going.

It’s also a great industry to be in due to the strength of its community. We got some great help from several Irish animation companies when we started out, in terms of understanding the trials, tribulations and pitfalls of being an animation company in Ireland.

These first conversations were instrumental to the survival of Giant and developed into sessions on how to build our business plans, take care of legal issues within animation and being introduced to the who's-who of the international community. Enterprise Ireland also invested in us as a ‘high potential startup’ and gave us a wealth of business knowledge, development consultants and mentors to harness our potential.

This sharing of knowledge or contacts within the community reflects extremely positively on all involved, as the international market sees us working together underneath the banner of 'Animation Ireland' as well as bringing really strong animation portfolios to the market.

How do you attract and keep talent?

It’s been hard to get the balance right in terms of determining the right talent, at the right price, for the right projects and at the proper time, especially when our project sizes vary. But I suppose it’s about treating people right and offering them developmental roles, which we constantly review with them to keep them—and ourselves—happy.

We attend a lot of animation and game [industry] events, like Pegbar.ie, so we network with and have built up a good reputation with a number of artists across Ireland. I think our brand as a company really speaks to artists and they relate to us.

The press coverage we receive and our social media also helps. We've had talent all over the world getting in touch with us, especially through our Vimeo channel. 

The Giant team at The Digital Media Awards

Tell us a bit about how animation works for your clients?

I guess it depends on the client and the project, but the core aspect of what we deliver to our clients is great contemporary design with motion in mind, and superb character animation that their audience can relate to.

We believe great characters and the animation that brings them to life can speak to audiences and communicate messages with great success.

Our process generally depends on the client. Sometimes they have scripts ready, sometimes storyboards and sometimes they just come to us with an idea. So our first steps include developing the visuals for the finished product as well as designing the motion and story through an animatic [a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence with a rough dialogue and/or rough sound track added]. These two elements should give a near perfect view on how the project is going to play out, and, once these two aspects are approved, we can then get stuck into production to finish the project.

We offer a range of services that encompass all facets of the production pipeline. Other than full animation production, we get a lot of work producing storyboards/animatics, character design and pre-vis animation.

Giant Animation Showreel 2013 from Giant Animation Studios on Vimeo.

How does the creative / production process work? 

When a client isn't involved we have a totally different process for creating and developing our own content. So generally, all Giants carry around their individual notebooks/sketchpads so they can throw down doodles, ideas and dialogue that interest them.

Some of these notes will grow and some won't. The ideas that grow will get brought in and discussed casually. Then, if they spark interest over 'water cooler' conversation, they are pitched internally at our I.P. sessions.

These I.P. sessions happen with all Giants sitting around a room, throwing notes and drawings on the walls and acting out scenes/characters. So it becomes this collaborative effort of taking ideas and trying to snowball them.

From here, we see [some] ideas naturally grow faster than others—those ideas get the green light to go into Giant's development process, whilst other ideas are given more time to be pitched again or to be scrapped. Then we strategise the development of that idea and create our own brief for the project.

Vikings

What inspires you?

Ha, the toughest question of all. I suppose my life has drastically altered so much in the past two years. I was hit with life changing experiences on a personal level, as well as making the transformation from a creative individual to a creative business director building a creative company.

So I've learned a lot and my spectrum of inspiration has been opened up a lot. Obviously as an entrepreneur I'm motivated by the challenge and love to create opportunity, but before that I am inspired by family, friends, art, story, other entrepreneurs and folk who go out and create for themselves.

The world is saturated with inspiration—whether you're having a conversation in a coffee shop with a friend, or you're taking time out to watch something like a TED talk.

The great thing about Giant is the company is made up of the inspirations of all four directors: Alex, Ben, Sean and myself. Although these inspirations may not be the same, the stronger individual influences do complement one another to make up the company's brand and goals which we're all extremely happy with and excited about.

What’s next for Giant in 2014?

We're looking at selling internationally, growing our team and continuing our run of developing properties. We also intend to continue working in collaboration with Sir Terry Prachett's production company, and we have another short film—a psychological thriller—that we're producing for the Irish Film Board that should see a 2014 release.

I think since starting the company it has been a massive learning curve for us. We're constantly updating our mandate on how to achieve our goals, and we will be pushing forward in 2014 with new and exciting content.

Fore more information visit www.giant.ie

This article originally appeared in Newstalk Magazine for iPad in November, for more details go here.