DIRECTOR'S bio

Ioan Holland is a British Writer & Director with Cumulus being his debut animated film. Ioan has been a filmmaker for eight years and loves to imagine other worlds: combining original fantastical ideas with familiar life challenges.

Spending his childhood summers visiting his grandma in Wales - or ‘Nain’ in Welsh - he has spent much time travelling across Europe, Asia, and Africa as a video producer. It’s this background combined with his passion for clouds and all things nature that have been the inspiration for Cumulus: imbuing the film with much of his Welsh heritage and sense of adventure and travel.

Ioan pioneered and built from the ground-up the remote team operations for the production of Cumulus. A feat of modern technology, Cumulus was produced from all corners of the globe without an office and with most of the team having never met in real life, working from as far afield as the UK, the USA, and Brazil.

Director FAQs

What was the inspiration for Cumulus?

As my debut animated film, Cumulus has been a labour of love from the beginning. Born out of an idea I had eight years ago that inspired me to begin working in film, it began with a deep interest in the atmosphere and clouds. There’s something uniquely wonderful about the skies above us that is a constant source of inspiration to me. I have long imagined another world in the clouds above, with analogous environments to those on Earth, like the Cumulus Forest our characters find themselves in: a world inside a classic cumulus cloud where the natural processes of updrafts of air and water are represented as trees trunks in a forest. I actually consulted with meteorologists in the creation of Cumulus to make the worlds and events as realistic and akin to real atmospheric processes as possible. Combine this with my love of great animated works from the likes of Studio Ghibli and Pixar, along with childhood favourites like Ivor the Engine and Wallace & Gromit, and creating Cumulus became a long-standing dream realised.

What is the story about?

Cumulus is about adventure and love, and that the two lie all around us in many guises, and that sometimes we're given a new perspective to reveal those things when they’re often hidden. The themes of the film deal with adventures of the outside world and the sometimes trickier and opposing adventures on the inside with our relationships with loved ones. It’s about balance of those different forms of adventure, growing, and seeing new and others’ perspectives that help us to appreciate the people we love.

Why is the film set in Wales?

I’m half-Welsh by blood and visited my grandmother in Cardiff with my family every year growing up. Feeling a great affinity with Welsh culture and language, much of the film is inspired by Wales. The film is set in the hardy and bracing environment of the Merthyr Mawr dune field on the south Welsh coast - just the right place to set an outdoor adventure in nature. The characters’ names help depict their character journeys in Welsh - Penwyn means fog (which she walks through to enter the Cumulus Forest), and her dad’s name, Bryder, means concern or worry, which is very much his character - while the harp in the soundtrack adds to the tapestry of Welsh heritage in Cumulus.

What was special about the production process?

Cumulus was produced remotely with a passionate team spread across the world and while I travelled across four continents. This means that most of us have never actually met in person and that we’ve worked from all corners of the globe without an office, and were able to produce a wonderful film with this workflow. The nature of the production meant that it was more important we had a talented and passionate team that would be happy to produce wonderful work on a very low crowdfunded budget of £2000, than what their geographical location was: and so our remote production was born. This allowed us to work with some really talented people with fantastic accolades, like our Lead Animator (Christine Kwon - Disney, Nickleodeon, and Warner Brothers Animation), our storyboard artist (Catherine Salkeld - Blue-Zoo Animation), and our voice actor for Mister Booby (Wayne Forester - The Magic Roundabout, Captain Scarlet, Horrid Henry). The remote model we pioneered to produce Cumulus also inspired a video production studio that now helps fund Cumulo Pictures.

Why does the film have a watercolour style?

I made it my goal to make Cumulus like a watercolour painting come to life. Working much with watercolour and inks growing up and later for an art foundation diploma, the tangibility of watercolour always intrigued me. For Cumulus we developed various new techniques to blend real watercolour with digitally painted watercolour to achieve an animated aesthetic that feels tangible - a paper-like touchable connection to the pictures on-screen - while also feeling alive and active, matching the organic nature of free-flowing watercolour paint with the natural environments and emotions we’re depicting.

What was the process for the original soundtrack?

The soundtrack to the film, composed by Aaron Buckley, was designed to remain aligned with the touchable simplicity of the watercolour visuals with a minimalist soundtrack comprised of just two instruments that represent the two main characters: the harp is the plucky and energetic Welsh Penwyn, and the piano is the heavier and grumpy Mister Booby. The two instruments come in and out and intertwine throughout the film to reflect the emotions, interactions, and arcs of our two main characters, in an effort to subtly enhance and communicate the emotions of the story.

‘Cumulus’ Directed by Ioan Holland

ioan@cumulopictures.com

PRODUCTION: TECHNIQUE

A WATERCOLOUR PAINTING COME TO LIFE

The Director’s intention with the film was to make a watercolour painting come to life, and it’s with the experimentation of new techniques that combine real with digital watercolour that the look and feel of Cumulus came to be.

By blending real watercolour with digitally painted watercolour, we hope to have achieved an animated aesthetic that feels both tangible and touchable like watercolour paper, while also feeling alive and active to drive the story forward.

Real watercolour paintings were often used as starting points in backgrounds, and were developed into digitally painted backgrounds that used a mixture of blending and layering of digital elements, and real watercolour mixed in: creating a real and digital watercolour tapestry for the backgrounds in our film.

A 2D digitally animated film, each frame of character animation in Cumulus was digitally drawn by hand, with a combination of digital and real watercolour bringing the character colours to life.

CONTACT

Director, Writer, & Producer

Ioan Holland

ioan@cumulopictures.com

+44 7732 367171

Producer

Gloria Daniels-Moss

gloria.danielsmoss@gmail.com

+44 7720 642108

DOWNLOADABLE MEDIA

Download Cumulus Stills

Download landscape movie poster

Download portrait movie poster

Download Cumulo Pictures Logo (Circular)

Download Cumulo Pictures Logo (Square)

‘Cumulus’ Directed by Ioan Holland

ioan@cumulopictures.com