Good luck to Feel Good Fan and creator of our gnomes, Debbie Hulme who is doing her degree show at the moment. Debbie is just finishing her final year of her Graphics course at DeMontfort Uni and all the students have to put on a display of their best work for family, friends and potential employers to come and take a look.

We think Debbie has done some brilliant work..but we might be a little biased!

You can hear more from Debbie in a few weeks time when she joins the team for a bit of work experience. We can’t wait.

Wednesday 20th May 2009

So this is it! Today I finally saw a finished version of the advert! I cannot really explain how exciting it was, having gone on this huge journey, through months of production, and it all came down to this.

I am so pleased with it, Feel Good Drinks and Loose Moose have done an outstanding job with the animation. It has all the charm and feeling of my original animations but with a lovely, funny new story. Its definitely the sort of thing that you can watch dozens of times and see something different every time! I challenge anyone to watch it and not feel good!

Friday 8th May 2009

Today was a very busy day. I started off at the Feel Good office, where I saw the new bottles for the first time with a picture of my gnomes on! It is so exciting to see the little picture on the side of the label, but quite unreal to see my name in print underneath it. Glen from Loose Moose joined us at the office and I met Tommy, who is making a behind the scenes video of the ad.

Libby and I had to be interviewed on camera, and I was very, very nervous! Whats more, I found out that Feel Good are doing a series of adverts in WHSmiths this summer featuring the gnomes! Every time I think this project cant get any more incredible it does!

Then I finally I got to see the animation in production. We headed over to the set which is, unbelievably in the basement of a hairdressers in Soho! With all the pipes glugging in the background, its perhaps not quite as glamorous as I had imagined, but just as exciting. Meeting Will the animator, was amazing, especially as I am a huge Wallace and Gromit fan and he was one of the main animators on A Matter of Loaf and Death. I probably annoyed him with all my questions, but then again, he and Glenn kept making terrible gnomes puns all day!  It has been an awesome day!

Tuesday 31st March 2009

Today I met Glen and Emma from Loose Moose, the animation company who are going to be producing the ad. I was quite daunted meeting them and also Steve, the marketing director and co-founder of Feel Good Drinks, but I should not have worried -  everyone is really laid back and friendly. We all had a meeting in the Feel Good juice bar about the ad – really just bashing out lots of the little details and story points before the storyboards were approved. Seeing the full storyboards was really exciting. They have got a bit of a different feel to the animations I produced – mainly because the ad is a lot shorter. But the essentials of the characters are the same, so that is lovely to see.

We spent ages discussing tiny details like how tall the gnomes should be – I inadvertently made things much harder for myself by making them so small to start with! We also spent a while discussing music options. Ragtime (or plinketty plonketty as I’ve been calling it) music seems to fit with the gnomes really well, but it is amazing how difficult it is to find the perfect pace and style within that.

Tuesday 17th February 2009

I went for a lunch meeting with Libby from Feel Good today. I really did not know what to expect, she just said she wanted to talk to me about something – and it turns out they want to make my concept into a TV ad! I am so excited! I never could have seen this coming when I started working on the project a year ago. Libby explained that they want to back up the TV ad with their labels, so a little picture of the gnomes is going to be on Feel Good bottles all over the country! And best of all they want to keep me involved in the creation of the ad, so I will get to watch it every step of the way! I am rather relieved that they are not asking me to do the action animation though – it would be a little beyond my expertise! As soon as I came out of the meeting I called my parents, although it was a little hard to stay coherent long enough to tell them why I was so excited!