Profiles

Bunny and the Bull is the debut feature film by Mighty Boosh director Paul King and it has a Nottingham connection.

The comedy road movie, set entirely in a flat, uses a myriad of special effects including post-production work by Andrew and Simon.

Character created for Canon

Look out for the 'made in Nottingham' backgrounds in the Switzerland scenes when the film is released this autumn.

Bunny and the Bull is just one example of the twosome's craft. Without knowing it you're likely to have seen their handiwork on your laptop in the form of the latest pizza chain viral, on your TV screens advertising an airline during the commercial break or at your latest business conference.

Working out of their studios on Mansfield Road, Nottingham, their team - Hot Knife Digital Media - specialise in moving image production, creating 2D and 3D animations and special effects they describe as more Toy Story than Wallace and Gromit.

Geometry at work

The knowledge

Andrew and Simon's big break came after writing and directing one of the UK's first narrative 3D computer animations for TV. 

"A little sci-fi adventure which kind of made no sense."

This ten minute production gave them the knowledge to take on commercial work at an early stage in the development of the computer graphics industry. They explain how they create 3D characters:

Andrew and Simon at work

"[You build] the geometry, you put a skeleton inside and then animate the skeleton and that drives the actual model."

To make a 30 second advert can take anything from a couple of days to several weeks, "depending on the level of detail the client requires".

However, they plan to continue to keep Nottingham at the forefront of animation in the years to come, having invested in the region's only purpose built renderfarm, "a boring stack of computers", which speeds up the drawing.

You can hear more 'design heroes' every Tuesday with Frances Finn, 09:00 to 12:00 on BBC Radio Nottingham (95.5 & 103.8FM, DAB and online).