W+K began to feel really Christmassy yesterday with a screening of Raymond Brigg’s The Snowman and a talk from one of it’s original animators Joanna Harrison. Joanna, who is the mother of one of our Platformers, had previously worked with W+K as an animator on the We Have Band video with her daughter Katie. The Platformers decorated the space with hundreds of handmade snowflakes and projected Yuki's interactive snowflake which responds to sound.

…and then as if by magic, it even began to snow.

Joanna introduced the film with anecdotes of continuity mistakes (note the motorbike covered in snow on one scene and without snow the next) and how when given the book by Raymond Brigg’s to produce a 20 minute animated film for Channel 4, they had no idea of what it would mean for generations to come. Joanna and her partner Hilary wrote in the scenes where The Snowman and James (named after Joanna’s husband) fly to the North Pole to meet Father Christmas which was not in the original book. She also directed the ‘bedroom scene’ where The Snowman puts on false teeth – referenced from Joanna’s great Grandma's and trousers which belonged to her husband at the time.  

After a very weepy ending, everyone gathered round to see original cels and backgrounds. Joanna also brought cels from The Yellow Submarine and explained that when she started working at TVC her first job was to throw away all the old artwork from the film!
At 12 frames a second, the amount of work and beautiful craftsmanship that went into the making of this film, is what makes it so special.  And that is why there will never be anything quite like The Snowman, and hopefully it will continue to make us feel that bit more Christmassy for years to come.

Lucy writes:

Yesterday Platform had the
pleasure of a visit and brilliant talk from one of our patrons Jeremy
Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Penguin. Jeremy told us all about the
projects he has been working on over the last couple of years to help take
Penguin literature into the 21^st Century.

Penguin no longer sees itself as
a book company, it is an entertainment company competing for our leisure time
against the likes of YouTube, Facebook, PlayStation and all sorts of other
entertainment channels. With this in mind the company is working to find new
and engaging ways to get audiences involved with Penguin content.

Here’s just a few of the interesting
projects Jeremy has created:

The We Tell Stories project aimed
to take Penguin content to a new audience, gamers. Each piece of content was
bought to life using playful digital technologies including, GPS mapping, blogs
and Twitter. This encouraged the audience to explore, feature in, follow or
customize the story as it played out in front of them. 

www.wetellstories.co.uk

Jeremy told us that the fastest
growing segment of internet users is 3-5 year olds. With this in mind Penguin created
the We Make Stories project. Their first paid for service that gets kids
creating their own stories using lots of different techniques like comics,
customizable pop ups and character creation.

www.wemakestories.co.uk

Spinebreakers was created for the
more challenging teenage audience. The site is created, designed and
curated by an ever changing panel of UK teenage readers giving them the control
of the books that are read, promoted and discussed.

www.spinebreakers.co.uk

Many thanks to Jeremy for coming in and sharing his work with us, it was a really great talk.