Animation &SpornFilms 01 Apr 2006 08:33 am
Bunny-itis
– We’ve finally finished the “artwork” on Reading To Your Bunny (not my idea of a title), and I ‘m pleased – sort of.
The film is based on an idea of Rosemary Wells‘ loosely presented in one of her books, “Read To Your Bunny.” She’s done a script, reworking the material, and we did a film. It uses an amalgam of her style of characters culled from a number of books.
The principal idea behind the story is to teach parents to read to their children. By reading aloud to their children, the kid will then get the impulse to read to themselves. It’s been proven and has been recommended by child psychologists for years. It’s just that people don’t realize the facts behind it. We did a film for UNICEF years ago which revealed the same information in a more straightforward way. It’s even been found that reading to a child in the womb has cognitive effects on the child. There’s quite a bit of research to back it up.
Anyway, this film is done – or at least the artwork is done. We’ll have it edited, locked and ready to go to mix by Tuesday. However, the music won’t come in till Wednesday, so we’re certainly on a schedule – of sorts. Not a moment too soon.
The film is scheduled to appear at the Tribeca Film Festival in a couple of weeks. (See the Mar. 26 posting.) It’s also already being sold to schools and libraries, and they have to be shipped by the end of the month.
When I finish a film like this, there’s some relief that it’s done and out of my hands, but there’s also disappointment that I’m not still in the thick of it. Even though it’s obviously not a career highlight, it’s a project that I’ve put a lot of care into, and got some satisfaction in the work, itself. The characters usually, in an odd way, grow on you.
We don’t have another job backing into it, so I’m going back to the POE film and will work on one of the stories. Perhaps we’ll do that as a short and put it out before the whole film is complete.
