A hotly anticipated new exhibition from the Cosgrove Hall Films Archive will explore the animated world of the multi BAFTA and RTS Award-winning Manchester animation house.
Scene on Screen will include recent acquisitions to the archive, including original design drawings and concept artwork from The Reluctant Dragon, Count Duckula and The BFG, and the show will also feature props and set pieces from stop motion favourites such as Postman Pat and Wind in the Willows.
Audiences will also be able to escape to Postman Pat’s Village Green and have a unique opportunity to view original hand-drawn artwork by founder Mark Hall loaned from Bridget Appleby, one of Cosgrove Hall Films art directors.
The exhibition has been created with specialist insider interviews from two of children’s televisions most talented art directors – Appleby and Barbara Biddulph, who both worked at Cosgrove Hall Films as production designers and art directors.
Within animation, a location could feature for a split second and yet designers, writers and art directors work tirelessly before production begins laying out, developing back stories and building out whole worlds to accompany and rationalise design decisions.
This is a practical tool to stage and frame their shots, but it also creates more convincing stories for audiences to get lost in. Animated worlds are an escape, and these story worlds are the stage for the performances to play out.
A designer’s role is to visualise a writer’s story and bring that to life, translating it into a convincing story world for audiences. In the initial stages of building an animated world, a designer might sketch out their ideas and keep reworking these: drawing and redrawing the terrain, picking out different formations of rocks, house styles, trees, evaluating what works and what doesn’t.
This process of experimenting and evaluating determines the overall appearance of the world and sets the tone of the animation. These dreamlike scenes are frequently not even shown in the final animation, but are crucial to building believable, relatable worlds.
Sale Waterside’s Gallery 74 will be displaying work from Appleby including recent loans from Pied Piper of Hamelin, plus character designs by her own hand, set within the worlds of Oakie Doke, Andy Pandy and BAFTA award-winning The Reluctant Dragon.
Curator and archivist, Rosy Whittemore said: “This exhibition will lift the lid on some of the detailed processes behind building worlds in animation, this is a rare opportunity for people to see drawings and artwork that have never be seen before from timeless classics such as The BFG and award-winning The Reluctant Dragon. People will be able to see different stages of the process giving a scarcely explored insight into the finer details of production design and art direction.”
Brian Cosgrove, co-founder of the celebrated Chorlton animation house, added: “This is fine artwork. To have the imagination to visualise these viewpoints on a subject, to have the skill and control to translate that imagined vision down into a drawing, to have created for himself a linear language that is pleasing to the eye and draws you in, to have a store of accurate, memorised details to elaborate and decorate the design…”
The exhibition runs from Saturday, September 24 to Saturday, January 6 and is free.
