We had been talking with Matthew Fitt (of ScotsHoose) for a while about creating animations for Scots language poems and songs. So when he came to us with original recordings by Alistair MacDonald and the idea of Coulter’s Candy we became very excited.
Matthew introduced us to inspirational artist Shona Lenaghan with whom we created the world of the film. Shona is based in the Borders and brought lots of the real history of Robert Coultard into the narrative, with visuals of places where he might have walked and sold his candy. Her beautiful detailed artwork was a joy to work with and she also helped create some of the animation like growing sunflowers
We all agreed that Ally should be a girl, and we see her grow up into a young woman, who goes away to sea and brings back the pennies
Harish Vallath came onboard to work with animating Coulter and Stephen Charles assisted us with the composition and design
A rewarding challenge for the team was to include 138 individual sweetie designs provided by children from local Borders Primary schools. All of them used vivid colours and many of them are artworks in their own right, so it was pretty hard to choose which to use in the final film. Fortunately you see every gorgeous sweetie tumbling in the end credit sequence.
