Nocturna is an incredibly beautiful movie. It has that magic from the old Disney features, the feeling that you are simply there. This universe really exists. It sucks you in.
It's hard to deny that the character designs in Nocturna are pretty weird. Especially the main character, Tim, looks very odd indeed. Honestly, those designs are too artsy for my conservative taste. But the backgrounds, the colors and the mood of the film is just wonderful.
So when I saw the teaser on the internet back in early 2006, I just knew that I had to be part of this film. I contacted the Spanish animator Sergio Pablos, whose studio, Animagic (now SPA Studios), had made a substantial part of the animation on Asterix and the Vikings, which I also worked on a year earlier. Animagic was subcontracting on the animation for Nocturna, and I managed to get a piece of that action.
How such a good looking film was made on a EUR 8 million budget seems a bit of a mystery. Well, one explanation is probably the Spanish wages. I worked pretty hard, churning out some six seconds (nine feet) of animation per week, but still only made about a third of a regular Danish animator's salary, certainly not something you can live on in expensive Scandinavia. But hey, I've got scenes in Nocturna, that's what matters.
This is a linetest of a sequence that I animated with Tim and Tobermory the cat (carrying the star, Adhara, on its back) as they run across the bridges in the sky from which the stars of Nocturna are suspended.
