'If you let an Oscar nomination get to your head, you'll never build on it - take it with a pinch of salt'

AFTER YEARS OF tipping along at a steady pace, over the past 12 months the award-winning Irish animation studio Brown Bag Films has found a new gear.

The company, founded by Darragh O’Connell and Cathal Gaffney, was acquired last year by Toronto-based 9 Story Media Group and moved into its new flagship 30,000 sq ft studio in Smithfield during the summer.

If that wasn’t enough for Brown Bag to have on its plate, employees on the books at the company have shot up from around 50 people to 205 in recent times, with plans to hit 255 by 2018.

It has all taken some getting used to, says O’Connell, but the acquisition last year has allowed him to focus even more on his passion – the creative side of the business.

“We only became business people out of necessity and now I can trust other people to do that and just really focus on making great shows,” he told Fora.

“I don’t have to worry about HR and finance because we have whole teams of people way smarter than me doing all that now. So, I’m purely working with artists and writers – it’s a weight off and been great.”

He says recruiting at the pace the company has been over the past year can make it tricky to maintain the original vibe of the business when it was a tight-knit 50-person operation, and added that the hiring drive will come to an end.

“It’s never been about the numbers, it’s been about how many shows we have wanted to do … but at some stage you have to decide enough is enough and you’re going to grow too thin along the top,” he says.

Darragh O'Connell (left) and Cathal Gaffney

Being picky

Earlier this week, O’Connell was part of a panel at the MediaCon summit in Dublin discussing how the age of on-demand media is affecting how children watch television shows.

He says media streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon are causing a lot of headaches for TV executives, but from his point of view it’s great for business.

“The way kids watch TV is changing and with Netflix and Amazon coming along, there is a huge challenge to traditional TV, but at the end of the day, what we create is exactly the same,” he says.

“We make great characters and great stories because kids nowadays are able to decide what they want, so if you don’t make something that really engages them, they’re just going to watch something else.”

There is no exact science at Brown Bag for choosing what projects the company takes on, even though children are very picky about what they watch. According to O’Connell, the company is nearly as picky as children when it comes to choosing who it works with.

“When we started out we did a lot of advertising and that was very useful to keep the doors open and pay the bills, but I’d say over the last eight to ten years we have been very careful about what we’ve chosen (to work on),” he says.

“You could be on a project for three years, so you really have to like the people you are working with. Take a project like Doc McStuffins, we’ve been working on that for nearly seven years and with long-term projects there is a danger of burnout because it is all very intense.”

Disney show Doc McStuffins

Big contracts

It seems to be a formula that works for Brown Bag. The most recent filings for the company show it delivered a profit of around €1.5 million in 2013 and it has bagged several contracts to produce shows for powerhouses of kids’ television such as Disney and Nickelodeon.

Brown Bag still produces the successful series Doc McStuffins for Disney, which has netted hundreds of millions of euro of merchandise sales, and the company recently landed €200,000 in state funding to produce another show for the American network.

Also in the pipeline is a second season of The Stinky and Dirty Show for Amazon and a remake of Watership Down that is scheduled for release in Christmas of next year.

O’Connell says the company focuses on trying to keep a balance between the original content it produces and service work it does for the likes of Disney.

“You can never fall out with anyone from this industry because you’ll either meet them on the way up or the way down. It’s always hard graft,” he says.

“Gillian Higgins in here is the head of TV production and she is just always selling and making sure that our names are in the pot when a new show is coming out.”

The Stinky and Dirty Show

Reputation

A lot of that reputation that keeps the Brown Bag name in the hat stems back to the many awards the production house has taken home over the years.

The company has won several Emmys for its work and has also been nominated for Oscars on two separate occasions for shorts Give Up Yer Aul Sins and Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty.

The Oscar recognition has also secured O’Connell membership of Hollywood’s illustrious Academy of Motion Pictures.

He says although the Oscars nominations are an honour, he has tried to keep himself grounded.

“It was good that it got us into the room, but really and truly, it’s only what you make of it. At the time it was fantastic, but it was for a short film that is not to the scale of all the other stuff we have done,” he says.

“If you let it get to your head, you will never build on it. You have to take it for what it is. It’s a lovely honour, but you have to take it with a pinch of salt.”