An animator from Ceredigion has spoken of his excitement at seeing a film that he worked on win an Oscar.

Andy McPherson was one of the animators for The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, which was nominated for Best Animated Short Film.

He worked on the film remotely, from his house above Penrhyncoch near Aberystwyth, and it was there that Andy watched the Oscars.

Commenting on the win, he said: “It was lovely and exciting.

“I re-posted some animation on Instagram after we won and it went bonkers, getting hundreds of likes every second and messages of congratulations from all around the world!

“It’s amazing to be part of an Oscar-winning team. So many really talented people around the globe touched this film. This is what collaboration can do.”

Andy started working on The Boy the Mole the Fox and the Horse in March 2021.

“Myself and Tim Watts were the first animators to do animation tests during the development of the characters,” Andy explained.

“The character models were still in development and we needed to design the way the boy would look in close-up shots.

“We also had to work out how the inking would work in animation. As this style of clean up had never been done before and the inking team needed to experiment with lots of different ways to make it similar to the style in the book. How would the boys hair look when it moved? Did he have eyelids and eye lashes? What did his mouth look like? Did he have teeth? So many problems to solve.

“So I was providing rough animation of the boy in close up and talking and moving, so that they could experiment with the look; I was problem solving as I went along and the inking team led by Andrea Minella and Seti Erfan solved the rest.

“This also applies to the design of the fox, horse and mole. I animated the fox for the first time in the snare, so that we could work out how the foxes mouth worked when he talked. What his teeth were like and ears paws etc., and how the tail would move and how the colour separation would work between the orangey brown and white. So many questions and so many problems to solve.

“Meanwhile Tim Watts was animating the walks and runs of the fox and horse to help the other animators as they came on board further down the line. He also invented the lovely little mole shuffle walk. Charlie [Mackesy, who wrote the book] wanted him to be reminiscent of a waddling penguin.

“I did quite a lot of development animation in rough. The beginning sequence, the fox in the snare, the boy saying ‘Oh no! The river’, and some of the mole, and then I went away for six weeks on another job, a promo for a computer game, Apex legends Metamorphosis. It’s sci-fi with a big panting monster and a superhero. You could not have got a more different job!

“When that was done I went back to Nonemore Productions and animated on The Boy... for the rest of the year.

“We went way over schedule and ended up working into 2022. It was done through lockdown so there were lots of Zoom meetings with the crew spread all over the world; animators, background artists, clean up and inkers, the director Peter Baynton and Charlie

Mackesy the writer, Cara Speller, producer, art director, Mike McCain in California, animators in Canada, Australia, Spain, Germany, Italy, India, France. There was an inker in Greece and I was in my shed here in Wales.

“A truly international crew.

“The number of people involved is mind boggling. And then there are also the actors providing the voices, the music composer, editors and all the promotional work and selling it to distributors around the world.

“Cara ended up getting a deal with the BBC and Apple TV, so it was eventually released around the world for Christmas 2022.”

To see more of Andy’s work on the Oscar-winning film, visit @andymccollmcpherson on Instagram.