Passion + Talent

“It’s made out of love”

We meet in the new office areas of Dockhus Animation in Innovatum Technology Park in Trollhättan. Up the spiral stairs is an office where four people work with their computers. Downstairs is a large table tennis (”the best thing we put here”) and handmade models of characters and milieus used for making animated films. In the basement, among old furniture, stacks of boxes, paint, brushes and all sorts of useful findings from different containers in town, sits the newest model. A beautiful done room with wooden floor, painted walls, windows where light can come in from different angles to make the perfect scenes for film sequences. Another model is a rooftop room with a small bed, a desk with paper on it, some suitcases leaning on the wall, empty boxes and a window where the moon shines in. It’s a room in miniature, made with such character and personality it feels alive. It’s as if you could go in and sit by the desk. How is the animation model done we ask with admiration in our voices? “It’s made out of love”, is the simple but evident answer.

Passion is the driving force. Every animator we meet talk about the passion, describe the characters they made with affection and love. They have names. Even for a character in a commercial for a telecompany or climate issues. At Meindbender Animation Studio we are introduced to “Doctor Meindbender”, a figure that looks like a crazy professor.

“Animation takes so much time”. Tarek Saleh, one of the founders of Atmo, shows us short clips of his latest production”Metropia”, the first full-length animated film in Sweden. It will be launched around May 2009. The most difficult part is that the productions of animated films take so much time to make, another is it’s hard to find talent. Tarek Saleh decided to place the production in Trollhättan, the small town of around 44.000 inhabitants, 78 km north of Göteborg. They had a choice of Hungary and Paris. Why Trollhättan? “The big disadvantage is recruiting talent, but the hugh advantage is that people working fully understand the project”. You must be with the production team and animators; otherwise you loose the feeling in the film, he tells us. In Trollhättan he has mixed experienced animators with non-experienced, something that works very well for keeping the edge.