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Swimming with Grace Directors Max Lang and Daniel Snaddon discuss the details of making the acclaimed animated adaptation of The Snail and the Whale.
M
ax Lang and Daniel Snaddon are no strangers to bringing popular children’s books to animated life. Lang is the helmer of Oscar-nominated The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom and the Annie-nominated and Int’l Emmy-winning 2019 special Zog, while Snaddon also directed Zog as well as Stick Man and worked on The Highway Rat and Revolting Rhymes. Their latest collaboration The Snail and the Whale is one of this year’s well-received shorts making the award season rounds. The project, which originally aired on BBC One in 2019, is based on a 2003 children’s book written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler and centers on a kindhearted snail who longs to see the world, so she hitches a lift on a whale’s tail. Nominated for a British Animation Award, the 26-minute short features the late Diana Rigg as the narrator, Oscar-winner Sally Hawkins as the intrepid snail and Rob Brydon as the whale. Lang says he finds himself easily drawn to the worlds of Donaldson and Sheffler, whose work also inspired Magic Light Pictures’ series of award-winning specials (The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom, The Highway Rat, Stick Man, The Gruffalo’s Child). “Julia and Axel have a great sense for creating memorable stories and characters,” says the Germanborn director. “There’s a lot of heart and warmth, but also wit and humor in the rhyme and good illustrations. If you work from such a strong foundation it gives you a lot of
freedom to focus on the creative aspects of filmmaking. We always try to stay very true to their original vision and add to it, as opposed to changing it.”
Shared Vision According to the filmmakers, the team began storyboarding and pre-production on the project while they were making Zog in 2018 and wrapped the show in October of 2019. “Balancing both productions was a bit of a trick, so I was glad that there were two of us directing,” says Snaddon, who worked with the talented team at Cape Town-base Triggerfish studios to produce the special. “Our producers, Magic Light Pictures (headed by producers Michael Rose and Martin Pope), are based in London and I was in Cape Town with Triggerfish, so the film is a result of international collaboration. All the images were made at Triggerfish, and at the height of production the team climbed up to around 70ish. The voice recordings, music and post-production
were all done in London with Magic Light.” Working with a ballpark budget of $2.8 million, the production team used Maya to create the CG animation with the exception of the water effects, which were produced using Houdini. Snaddon explains: “We created a Maya to Houdini, back to Maya then to Arnold workflow for the VFX shots. Arnold’s Scene Source (.ass) files really made this possible. All the comp was done in Nuke.” Snaddon says while the two main characters are quite different from each other physically, the creative team discovered that in both cases, less was more. “It drove the animators a little crazy in the beginning because they like to move stuff, but once we found the rhythms for our two leads, we found that there is a real connection between the two in their gentle and more subtle motions,” he recalls. Beyond the technical details, the production faced various challenges along the way. The team at Triggerfish (Adventures in Zambezia, Khumba)
‘In its core it has a friendship between two characters that couldn’t be more different. It celebrates the beauty of our planet and its environmental message is very clear but doesn’t hit you over the head.’ — Writer-director Max Lang
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february 21
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