AT the premiere of Give Up Yer Aul Sins, young Peig Cunningham's storytelling has the audience in fits of giggles. Sighs of disappointment can be heard when the screening ends and the lights go up. Only five minutes long, this film is an animated drama based on the best-selling soundtrack of the same name, recorded in the 1960s, and featuring bible stories told by young children from an inner-city, Dublin school. The audience gathered at the Old Jameson Distillery in Smithfield for the premiere clearly love the cartoon and are delighted when director Cathal Gaffney, of Brown Bag Films, tells us that plans are under way to extend the five-minute masterpiece into a halfhour programme for RTE. Producer Darragh O'Connell is also beaming as people file out.
Sisters Yvette and Ruth Monahan give the film the thumbs up. Julie Kirby from MAC Communications loves it too. "The children's voices are just brilliant, and the setting is so well done with trams and buses," she says. The recording released by EMI last year proved hugely popular - the bible stories told by young children are refreshing and very funny. This first animated film illustrates the story, well, one version anyway, of St John the Baptist.
Cathal Gaffney explains that the cartoon took more than a year to make, as one second of film requires 24 separate drawings. Sounds like hard work. "We wanted it to look like it was a reel of film found in someone's attic. The original voice recordings were so old we decided against making a very clean and modern looking film - we animated film scratch lines, even animated camera shakes and microphone coming into frame," says the young director.
The premiere attracts lots of faces from the film, animation and advertising industries. In the foyer of the distillery are Karen O'Malley from Clarence Pictures, Gerard O'Rourke from Monster Animation, and film producer Robert Walpole, of I Went Down, along with colleague, Rachel O'Flanagan. Jennifer McGrath from Windmill Lane is here to lend support, as is Derry O'Brien from Network Ireland Television.
Pity though that the original voice, Peig Cunningham - long since grown out of short socks - is not here tonight to see her story immortalised on film.
