The Oscar nomination allowed Gaffney and O'Connell to meet animation heroes John Lasseter and Cordell Barker. John Lasseter photo © 2002 Nibariki. TGNDDTM. All rights reserved; Cordell Barker photo courtesy of Cordell Barker and Production Pascal Blais.

HK: How did that nomination change your life?

DO: It’s one of those things that you can always attach to your name when you’re raising funding for a project or trying to get people attached. It has raised our profile abroad enormously and has opened a lot of doors.

The experience itself was fantastic and it was a great buzz to meet many of the people who had been an inspiration for us up to that point like John Lasseter and Cordell Barker.

HK: How have you evolved the short into a series? What can we expect each episode to look like?

Because the original CD recording had 70 minutes of stories, expanding the short to a TV series was a natural evolution. © Brown Bag Films/RTE/RTE International/Irish Film Board/EMI.

DO: For us it was a natural progression to make a series, but it wasn't until the film was nominated for an Oscar that RTE agreed to fund the series. From the moment we saw the reaction to the short we knew we wanted to animate more of the stories. The original soundtrack was taken from a 70-minute CD so we knew there was plenty more material. Often people asked were the other tracks as good, as surely we had already used the best track for the original film, but the fact was, we used that track because it was the first one on the CD and it was the first one that we heard.

I think the new episodes stand up to the original and are just as funny. We tried to remain true to the original and retain the same aged look. Of course we made some changes like adding more traffic on the Dublin streets for the opening shots of each episode. We also had great fun designing extra characters but made a decision to use many of the characters over and over in different roles for each show. We felt it gave more continuity to the shows and let the audience become familiar with the characters. We also liked them too much to include them in roles that were too fleeting and so we used them again and again.

Gaffney and O'Connell continue their "animated documentary" style of storytelling with the Give Up Yer Aul Sins television series. © Brown Bag Films/RTE/RTE International/Irish Film Board/EMI.

HK: Can you talk a little about Brown Bag Films?

DO: Brown Bag was founded by Cathal and myself back in 1994. It was a very different climate for animation in Ireland at that time. Emerald City and Animedia had just closed down. Fred Wolf and Don Bluth were cutting back and here were these two young brats going to the bank looking for money to set up an animation studio. I think they saw it as a failing industry back then but it’s changed a lot since and now there are a lot of Irish owned studios.

Most of the work for animators is still contract based and we have a steady pool of freelancers who work from job to job. We have a key group of eight full-time people, but during the production of Give Up Yer Aul Sins that went up to about thirty people.

HK: Where will people be able to see the series?