Interview with ‘The Abominable Snow Baby’ Director Massimo Fenati
Eagle Eye Drama will be releasing their next animated short film on Channel 4 on Christmas Day with their adaptation of Terry Pratchet’s children’s book, The Abominable Snow Baby.
While wrapping up the end of post-production on the film, I spoke with the director Massimo Fenati and as well as getting an insight into what it was like to direct an animated film, he also shared his journey into the animation industry.
How did you start your career in animation and how did it lead you to be the Head of the Animation Department at Eagle Eye Drama?
I started doing small Flash animations in 2006 to create little marketing assets to promote my first illustrated book (Gus & Waldo’s Book of Love, Orion) and its characters. I rapidly became quite keen on that, as animation had always been my dream since childhood. That led me to a few years of work as a motion graphic designer for the TV industry, working on exciting projects like the BBC4 documentary on Dadaism Gaga for Dada, for which I put together a dozen fully animated segments.
As my illustration career took off, I put animation aside for a while but then the covid pandemic changed everything: as I saw my colleagues at Eagle Eye Drama stuck with two productions about to start but ground to a screeching halt, I thought that that was the right time to pitch animation projects to TV channels, as animation, unlike drama, can be done all remotely.
I had a contact with Quentin Blake so we pitched Channel 4 the idea of a Christmas special based on one of his books and we got the project green lit in the space of a few days! Quentin Blake’s Clown was a big success on the channel, and with Eagle Eye Drama we are now building on that, developing a number of new projects after having just finished the new Channel 4 Christmas special for this year.
You were an Executive Producer on the adaptation of Quintin Blake’s Clown last year for Channel 4. What did you and your team of animators take away from that production for this new venture?
It was an absolutely hectic production as we only had 5 months to deliver a 21-minute animation! We worked around the clock, but the learning curve was incredible. The first thing was to learn to manage a big team remotely. Of course having everybody under one roof is preferable, but the pandemic really rewrote the rule book and I think that remote work is here to stay. But at least, since we couldn’t be all in the same room, we felt we could reach out to great animators around the globe. The biggest problem we had in that production was the absence of an animatic, due to lack of time. We used the book itself as a storyboard but I now can say how vital a proper animatic is and how much it has made our lives on the new project much better.
The Abominable Snowbaby
How did your team get involved with adapting Terry Pratchett’s The Abominable Snow Baby and why did you want to become its director?
I am a creative and production management doesn’t come natural to me. I worked as an executive producer on Clown because the Genoese animator Luigi Berio was my contact to Quentin Blake, and they had talked about adapting that book together in the past so it made perfect sense for him to be the director on that show. But my skills are in storytelling and leading a team creatively rather than organising a production schedule, so as soon as I could, I jumped the fence and became a director.
It was also the perfect project to involve my good friend Tess Cuming, who’s been a perfect EP on this. I have adapted a number of books in the past for my graphic novels, and I co-wrote the script for Clown, so I felt I could do a good job to adapt that charming Terry Pratchett short story into a full 24-minute animation and I had also huge fun designing the characters, aided by some of my best animators. Setting the whole style, coming up with the narrative and aesthetic vision, and choosing the right people for the team was a fantastic experience.
What unexpected obstacles did you face in the director’s chair?
For me the biggest (but somehow also most exciting) challenge was to understand how much of my original vision I could push for and where my briefs should stop to allow the great artists involved (background artists, animators, compositors, sound designers) to also have their own input. It’s a very fine balance as a project needs proper consistency of vision but I also really value teamwork and I think that a film can only be improved by the additional input of more creative minds. That also involved understanding the strengths of each team member (i.e. action vs. dialogue, humorous vs. serious, etc.) and assign the right shots to let them make the most of their talents.
Without trying to spoil the film, what was your favourite part or element to work on?
There’s a shot where Granny and Snow Baby (the two protagonists) have just met and walk down the street together, it’s the start of their bonding, they’re seen walking from behind, making eye contact, holding hands. When I first saw the rough, which my animator and animation supervisor Reg Isaac had done, it was a very emotional moment: it’s not just a very poignant stage in the film, but also what I could see on screen and the original images I had in my mind coincided so perfectly that I lived a few seconds of pure, deep happiness.
Model Sheet of Granny
Having now directed the film, what advice would you give to upcoming directors or people who want to get into animation?
Spend as long as possible on the animatic, refine it to the finest detail, even draw architectural plans of the characters’ layouts and movements in their environments to study camera angles and movements. Be as accurate as possible and the rest of the process will run much more smoothly.
Now that the film is nearly released, what is Eagle Eye Drama’s next project or what role would you like to do next?
I’ll keep my director’s cap on! And for the next few months I will also gladly dive into development, but we already have some very exciting projects we’re looking into, and that could be green lit at any moment… but of course I can’t jinx it, so watch this space!
The Abominable Snowbaby and Granny
The Abominable Snow Baby will air on Channel 4 on Christmas Day at 7.30pm.