P&D wins @ Ranimatie!

Yesterday Paul & the Dragon won the Animation for Kids price
at the Ranimatie festival in Rotterdam!
Special thanks to the jury and organization of Ranimatie!
We are now the proud owners of this most excellent lamp:

Festival news!

Last weekend 'Paul & the Dragon' won the first prize in the competition for professionals at the Zwolle Animation festival 2009. We won an Adobe CS4 software package. Excellent! Special thanks to the jury of the festival and to Adobe! The film will also be shown this weekend and Monday at the Ranimatie festival in Rotterdam. The film has also been selected for this year's International Film Festival Zlin for Children and Youth in the Chech Republik!

Fallin' Floyd

Some very early concept art for a project, where we want to try to mix cut-out animation with hand drawn animation.

P&D reviews, interviews, fanart and...oh my!

First off, a big thanks to the crew of Animated Views. They put up a review of our film Paul & The Dragon, plus they interviewed us on the making of the film.
Click *here* for the interview and *here* for the excellent review.

Then, here are two more (Dutch) reviews in two magazines, BSM magazine and Nederlands dagblad:

Last month, in connection with the International Childhood Cancer Day, the kids of primary school Johan Friso held a fundraiser for the The Dutch Childhood Cancer Parent Organisation (VOKK). Those crazy kids raised 1170,93 euros! And in class they also made these wonderful Paul & the Dragon drawings and paintings. Sweet! Check out all the other art pieces by clicking --->HERE.

Happy Easter!

So what Easter was two days ago. I was busy searching eggs.

Saint Nick is coming to town

Here are some early characters designs and sketches for an upcoming project:

Stuttgart here we come!

'Paultje en de Draak' will be playing at the 16th Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film in Germany. It's been selected for the Tricks for Kids competition. We'll be attending the festival from the 5th till the 10th of May.

Warm up sketches

Couple of warm up sketches from this cold February. Let spring commence. Please.

Paultje in the news

On the 15th of February, International Childhood Cancer Day, our film Paultje en de Draak will be officially released and distributed in Holland.
Yesterday Paul himself presented the dvd in the Radboud Hospital in Nijmegen.
The newsshow Hart van Nederland was there to report and you can watch their item here: Hart Van Nederland.
Also special thanks to Animated News and AnimatieBlog for mentioning the film in this week's news.

And now for something completely different

When I grow up I want to make a movie about pirates and monkeys. That'd be great.

Hey! Who turned off the lights?

Last week we were out of sugar in the studio and Jelle panicked. To make it up to him, I got a megapack o' sugar and as a bonus here are a couple of moviestills from Little Quentin, our hipster dark darky dark cartoon noir:

Hey, look at the date

It's 2009. And we're gonna work hard to make this the year of excellence.
So we're blasting off the first post of this year with some stuff from our new weird short film Little Quentin. Here's a little teaser poster (sorta Saul Bass ripped off inspired) and a couple of modelsheets for some of the characters:

Happy Holidays!

Paultje & de Draak: now available

This week the dvds of the film arrived and also the excellent Paul and the Dragon Special Edition funpack with quartet card game, stickers, pencils, pinball-game and friends/game book. Christmas comes early this year:

Paultje in 3D

A couple of weeks ago we visited sculptor Frans van Straaten in his studio.
He'd saved three of the larger Paultje sculptures (made for the The Quality of Life Gala) for us and we picked them up :

Once again, thanks a lot, Frans! The sculpture got a nice spot in our studio!