IT WAS when Edinburgh animation duo Neil Jack and Cameron Fraser were driving to Glasgow to meet the BBC that Fraser came up with an idea for a short film set in the dark, dank bowels of Edinburgh. "It happened somewhere around Harthill," says Jack, who set up Ko Lik in a former whisky warehouse in Leith three years ago with Fraser who, at 47, is 20 years his senior. They certainly didn't expect the BBC to like their idea so much that they would end up commissioning it as a half-hour special to be shown this New Year's eve.
Haunted Hogmanay, which features the voices of Alex Norton and Peter Capaldi, is a charming stop-frame animation following an amateur ghost-hunter (Capaldi) and his egomaniacal step-brother (Norton) as they venture beneath the streets of Edinburgh's Old Town on Hogmanay to sniff out the spirit of Morag Lachlan Maclachlan, a devilish poltergeist and one-time whisky smuggler.
"He's one of those terrible, enthusiastic people," says Taggart star Norton of his character, Thurston McCondry. "As soon as I read the script, I thought 'yes please' because I love doing parts that are nothing like me.
I just love animation and want to do more of it."
Norton says it was "a joy" working with Capaldi, whom he first met on the set of Local Hero in 1983. "Normally with animation you do your lines separately, but they wanted to get that rapport between us so we did it together like it was a radio play, running through it three or four times in one day," he says.
"We were both as high as kites when we came out of the studio."
Haunted Hogmanay is Ko Lik's most ambitious project to date, and the sets, which mock up Edinburgh's cobbled streets, closes and pends in miniature, are stunning, as are the Plasticine puppets.
In the three years that Ko Lik has been going, Jack and Fraser, who write, direct, produce and animate, have become Scotland's answer to Aardman, and Aardman supremo Nick Park is a fan.
Their sophisticated and painstakingly detailed stop-frame animation, combined with in-depth characterisation and deadpan delivery, echoes the formula that has made the Wallace and Gromit phenomenon such a success. "I can't believe that we've pulled it off," says Jack, explaining that the studio completed Haunted Hogmanay for a modest £250,000, in less than a year, which, considering the techniques they use mean it takes a day to film just five seconds, is pretty impressive. Though it may sound like a lot of money for a half-hour animation, when you consider Robbie the Reindeer cost in excess of £1m and took around 18 months to make, Ko Lik have more than earned their stripes.
"Every single part of making it is time consuming and labour intensive, from making the puppets, to animating them, to post-production," Jack says. "You're making a film frame by frame and looking back on it, the amount of work that had to be done by so many people to bring about each shot is just baffling."
Working with a core team of around 10 people, including recent graduates from Edinburgh and Dundee, they sent a French production designer into Edinburgh's Mary King's Close to build the small-scale sets out of polystyrene while a group of model makers got to work on the puppets, which stand at around "two coke cans in height".
Ko Lik's first short film The Tree Officer won two Scottish Baftas as well as a slew of other awards, and another short, Ujbaz Izbeneki Has Lost His Soul, is currently wowing audiences on the festival circuit. Now that they're venturing into half-hour films, with a follow-up to Haunted Hogmanay already in development, their ambition to make feature films seems ever more likely.
"That's ultimately where we want to end up," says Jack.
"I haven't done anything this year but work but I'm happy to repeat the whole affair next year."
Haunted Hogmanay is on BBC 1 Scotland, December 31, 6.
News RSS