Podcast: Louise Bagnall & Nuria G. Blanco (‘Late Afternoon’)
In our first Skwigly Animation Podcast of 2019 we meet Louise Bagnall and Nuria González Blanco, director and producer respectively of the Cartoon Saloon short film Late Afternoon. The film, about an elderly woman named Emily who mostly lives in an inner world alternating between interwoven fragments of memories of her past and glimpses of the present, is among the 2019 Oscar nominees for Animated Short. Starring Fionnula Flanagan and featuring a richly atmospheric score by Colm Mac Con Iomaire set to beautiful animation, Late Afternoon continues the studio’s tradition of captivating and universally appealing shorts that include Nora Twomey’s From Darkness, Paul Ó Muiris’s The Ledge End of Phil and Julien Regnard’s Somewhere Down the Line.
A creative director at Cartoon Saloon, Louise Bagnall’s body of work includes the previous animated shorts Cúl An Tí, Loose Ends and Donkey, having also worked as a character designer on Puffin Rock and The Breadwinner. Upcoming projects Louise is involved with include Nora Twomey‘s My Father’s Dragon on which she serves as assistant director and Tomm Moore‘s Wolfwalkers as a storyboard artist.
A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland where she studied Animation, producer Nuria González Blanco has since been involved with a wide variety of animation projects spanning advertising, film and children’s television, inlcuding The Breadwinner, Puffin Rock and Violet.
Also discussed in this episode – the legacy of Cartoon Saloon as a whole, the end of the NFTS’s BAFTA streak (as well as the encouraging implications of this year’s nominees and winners) and the one-two punch of new Disney trailers for the Aladdin remake and Frozen 2.
Direct download or stream below:
Presented by Ben Mitchell and Steve Henderson
Interview conducted and edited by Steve Henderson
Edited and produced by Ben Mitchell
Music by Ben Mitchell