A big thank you to TVPaint !

Ethel and Ernest was animated using a software called TVPaint. When the film was first being developed, way back in 2007 (!), we were going to animate it on paper. That was how all the other Raymond Briggs films had been done (The Snowman, When the Wind Blows, Father Christmas, The Bear, and The Snowman and Snowdog). However, technology has moved on and in the intervening years TVPaint has become more and more the industry standard for hand drawn animated films. Using a Wacom cintiq to draw on, the animators can reproduce a line quality that is virtually indistinguishable from a line drawn with a graphite pencil on paper.

Many of our crew were new to TVPaint, but tutorials were given by Lupus Films’ animation supervisor Isobel Stenhouse, and also Elodie Moog from TVPaint was always on hand to answer any questions.

So a big thank you to TVPaint for all their support throughout the production !

Elodie Moog from TVPaint answering questions while on a visit to our co-production partners, Cloth Cat Animation, in Cardiff .

All three studios, Lupus Films, Cloth Cat Animation, and Studio 352 all used the TVPaint software. Here it is being used at Studio 352 in Luxembourg.