Tuesday, 14 April 2015

Company Research - Part 2 - Makinnon and Saunders





Mackinnon & Saunders are one of the world’s leading puppet making companies specializing in the design and construction of characters for television shows, feature films and commercials.


What I like about Mackinnon and Saunders is that they are teaming up with company's such as Fantastic Flying Films and are helping to create fun new series like Calamity Island from the creator of Koala Brothers, David Johnson. I found the pilot for Calamity Island utterly adorable and couldn’t  look away for a second.  I immediately fell in love with the stylized appearance of the characters and the addition of mischievous penguin adds a lovely quirk to the plot.


You can watch the pilot episode here
https://vimeo.com/37950651 


They are also responsible for the puppets in TV series such as Bob the Builder, Postman Pat and the one I’m most excited about THE CLANGERS!  Its wonderful to see that these animations are being made and filmed in their original stop motion format and not horrifically recreated using CGI.

 



I first stumbled upon Mackinnon and Saunders when I found out that they made the puppets for one of my all-time favorite films ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’. The popular children’s book by Roald Dahl is a big happy memory from my childhood and I had to know more when I found it was being made into a stop motion feature film.

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/fantasticmrfox/images/e/e8/FantasticMrFox.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140509182615

I'd be very interested in working for Mackinnon and Saunders because of the huge variety of projects and films they work on. I imagine each of which comes with its own unique set of problems to solve in innovative and interesting ways.

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