Myles McLeod (right) with his brother Greg at the BAFTA awards
(Photo: BAFTA)
Codswallop at the BAFTAs
Myles McLeod on making his red carpet debut with his animator brother Greg
I don’t usually receive phone calls from the other half of The Brothers McLeod before 9.30am. My older brother Greg knows that before this time it’s likely I won’t have eaten breakfast and will therefore be rather cranky.
However, on the 15th January, Greg phoned me at 8.30am. Something was up. It was either terrible or wonderful. On this occasion it was, thankfully, wonderful. We had been nominated for a BAFTA in the Short Animation category for our film Codswallop. Wow!
Codswallop features a collection of uncanny characters at crucial moments in their briefly glimpsed stories. There are always two stories unfolding on screen at any one moment. And compared to the other two contenders in the category it’s also very short at three-and-a-half minutes, which explains why the other main accolade the film has won so far is Best Short Short.
The project originated in 2007 when Greg started sending postcards to his son, Louis. Greg bought some blank postcards, drew extraordinary characters at interesting or crucial moments – a man with a shelf-like head wondering if his head looked wide in two hats; a giant elf lost in the woods; a multi-eyed fiend riding a bicycle – and sent them back to his house for Louis to receive. Needless to say, Louis loved them.
We were busy with a variety of animation projects at the time: commercials produced by Aardman Animations, various children’s TV scripts and a series of short animations for CBBC. In amongst all of these projects Greg started to turn the postcards into animations. It had to fit around other work, and was done piecemeal over the next year, but eventually Codswallop was finished, voiced by members of the family from five-year-old Louis up to his great grandfather, 95-year-old Grandpa Coleman.
My main role in the film, apart from a lot of the voices, was to keep Greg believing in the original concept. All of us know how easy it is to start on something enthusiastically and then, once we’re half-way through, to start wondering if it really is as good as we once thought.
One of the main things we discussed mid-production was how you could have two stories on screen at once without it being confusing. We chose to have the story playing out in the left panel slightly dominating the one in the right. That allowed the film to flow, but also meant that if you were to watch the film a second time and concentrate on the right panel, you would notice things you hadn’t seen before.
Two stills from Codswallop
Starting out
Greg and I started working on stories and animation together in about 2000. I was still working as an assistant producer at the BBC, while he was about to produce his first animation by teaching himself to use Flash, a software package originally developed to add animation into web pages. My interest in writing and his love of illustration and animation were on an inevitable collision course.
In the beginning we just wrote and created little animated sketches. We published them online for our friends to see. Then we won some funding from Screen West Midlands and the Film Council to make our first proper short film, Dog Tired. A dabble in viral filmmaking for the internet brought us success with an election spoof featuring Tony Blair and Michael Howard as The Uncredibles.
More success followed with our short films about a hapless ninja in training called Fuggy Fuggy which was later licensed to MTV and recently won an Audience Award at the New York International Children’s Film Festival. Then we joined the YouTube revolution and our audience became global.
We started attracting the attention of people at Aardman and the BBC. We worked on advertising campaigns for Skittles, Stena Line and Guinness and wrote and directed for the CBBC series Pedro And Frankensheep. In the meantime I’d also completed my MA in Screenwriting at Bournemouth University and had started writing for children’s TV and games, including a personal favourite, SpongeBob SquarePants.
Questions
There are two main questions that people ask us. Are you really brothers? And, how do you work with your brother? The answer to the first question is ‘yes’. I think the second question comes out of the fact that a lot of people don’t get on with their siblings. That’s not been a problem for us and indeed it wasn’t when we also worked with our sister and parents in our former incarnation at Spark and Zoom Productions. We put it down to the fact that we have a different set of skills. Greg is primarily a visual artist and I take the lead with the writing. But there is crossover too. We come together to discuss story and to generate new ideas. We also work together directing, each providing a ‘fresh pair of eyes’ on the others suggestions.
We’ve always tried to challenge ourselves to do new types of story, or to use new techniques in our filmmaking. This is partly where Codswallop came from. It was also a very personal project. When you’re working on a lot of other people’s material there is always a level of compromise that has to come with that process. It can be fun to work with a big collaborative group and you learn so much from that interaction. But sometimes you have to go away and make something on your own, just as a kind of selfish artistic act.
I think that’s what makes the BAFTA nomination for Codswallop so special. It was a film that we made for ourselves, and yet it has gone on to feature at a number of great international film festivals and has now had a nod for an award.
It is a great privilege to share our nomination with former BAFTA winners, Nick Park, Bob Baker, Marc Craste and Sue Goffe. I’m also very pleased to see that the three nominated films represent different types of animation: stop motion, 3D and 2D. I met Nick Park at the nominee party the night before the awards ceremony and congratulated him on his inevitable win. He was very polite and suggested that on the contrary he might be watching me collect an award (as if!).
BAFTA night
Attending the awards event was quite unreal. We started by leaping into a taxi and ordering the driver to go to the BAFTAs. I think he was rather excited. We were too. We were dropped at the end of a very long red carpet where we walked past a lot of people waiting to see Brangelina. Then we entered the Royal Opera House, had a photo taken and mooched around upstairs awhile until taking our place in the stalls. The awards were suitably glitzy and star-studded. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many famous people in one place before. There was one moment later in the evening where I saw Meryl Streep hug Penelope Cruz while both stood beside Daniel Craig. I wondered for a second if some kind of celebrity critical mass might be achieved, and an atomic explosion would destroy us all. But no.
The crucial moment arrived for our category. It was the third one of the evening. I duly had a camera trained closely on my face for any reaction. The winning film was read out. Wallace and Gromit. Of course!
Were we disappointed? Perhaps a little. How could you not want to win when you’ve been selected as one of the three nominees? But we both knew that this was really stiff competition. Wallace and Gromit’s Christmas Special had been seen (and loved) by over 15 million people! And even without Nick Park’s duo, there was Marc Craste and Sue Goffe’s beautiful film Varmints which I’d encourage you to see at a film festival if you can.
Post-awards, BAFTA have been very supportive of the short animations and short films. They’ve taken the shorts to a series of festivals around the country, and asked us to go along to do Q&A sessions too. A
s for the future, Greg and I are currently developing concepts for children’s and comedy TV, and are currently scripting and designing for another Screen West Midlands/4mations funded short film we’ve titled The Moon Bird.
The Brothers McLeod Website: www.bromc.co.uk
Blog: www.brothersmcleod.co.uk/posts
YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/brothermcleod
back to top