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WA: What is your process for stop-motion? You are kind of an engineer and an artist at the same time. Quite a lot of the things you do to prepare for the performance have a lot to do with getting all the hardware right and in the right place—rigging is a big part of this to help you achieve exactly what you want—and planning out positions of the camera and the puppets.

WA: Is there a difference for an animation company working with a streamer as opposed to a public broadcaster? The old days when public broadcasters were the major players are over, so we need to make sure that producers and creatives feel that we are the best match for their project. And that means building a strong network, telling a strong story, and making sure that we have ambitions when it comes to animation.

Speaking of Cairo… Sara and her husband, composer and musician Sune “Køter” Kølster, have been working more and more in Egypt in recent years. Driven by a shared passion for Arabic music, they have repeatedly traveled to Cairo and held workshops and exhibitions. SK: My husband is the composer for all my films, and I started wondering if we could get an art exhibition together somewhere in the Middle East to explore more Arabic music and to get inspired.

ANIDOX:LAB Supports the Movement For filmmakers Michelle (b. 1977) and Uri Kranot, the journey has been a personal one. Driven by a passion to make films with powerful political messages, such as the multi-award-winning Hollow Land (2013), they worked without regard to classification or genre. However, when their work started being referred to as ‘animated documentaries’, they embraced the label, and used it as they collaborated and mentored other animators.

WA: Firstly, congratulations on the spectacular success of Ella Bella Bingo. It’s broadcast around the world, and been on the air for over ten years… you’ve been working with it for all that time, and must have been in development for a year or two before that. FM: Actually, that’s a funny story. In 2009 we were working with NRK (the Norwegian public broadcaster) on a project called “Babboo”, about a monkey.

Luc Perez’s new animated short film The Drowned (original title, Den Druknede) was inspired by the 2006-novel We, the drowned, by Carsten Jensen. The novel and film are about the seafaring people of Marstal in the early 20th century in Southern Denmark. It’s about the lure of the ocean, and men who sail and trade and fight there, and the women who maintain life and hope and build a future in the village.

With the screenplay finished, the team went about developing storyboards and creating animatics. “That was a good process, because we also let the story be influenced by what was happening visually and could go back and forth and do new iterations of the script,” explains Amalie Næsby Fick. Working on the animatic allows the creative team to get a feel for how the story beats are going to play out in the finished film and is an important tool for developing the story.

The unique format of the film, as an animated documentary with archival film footage, means that it is currently nominated for three Academy Awards, as Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature, and Best International Feature Film. It is the first film in history to be nominated in all three of these major categories simultaneously.

Sarita Christensen decided to leave Zentropa, where she had worked for ten years, and start something new. When asked about the origins of the company and the decision to leave Zentropa, Christensen says: “I love kid’s content, and I wanted to redefine it. Looking at Lego, and Disney, and the huge range of children’s role models, you start thinking about how to do it better, how it could be different, how it could be Nordic and reflect our culture, How could we make new classics?