Petaluma’s Lightstream builds cred with ‘Pig on the Hill’ movie

Toys.

Toys everywhere.

That’s one of the first things you might notice upon stepping into the offices of Lightstream Animation in Petaluma. Standing and posing on every shelf, between posters and paintings and sketches on the walls, are toys and figurines and models and action figures depicting aliens, robots, pirates, talking animals and superheroes of all kinds. With one or two exceptions, they all come from some movie, television show or TV commercial created by Petaluma’s Jamy Wheless and Novato’s John Helms, many of those characters designed and animated right here on the second floor of the Great Petaluma Mill.

“It’s fun, and kind of amazing and inspiring, to have all this stuff around,” says Wheless, smiling, as he sits at the conference table virtually surrounded by the figments of his and Helms prolific imaginations. The two met while working for Industrial Light and Magic, creating special effects and digital characters for such movies as “Pirates of the Carribbean,” “Transformers,” “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,” “Peter Pan, “Eragon,” “Men in Black I and II,” “The Time Machine,” “The Perfect Storm,” “Hulk,” “Wild Wild West,” “Star Wars” (the prequels) and “Pearl Harbor.” Since teaming up to create Lightstream Studios several years ago, the two have created animation or effects for videogames, commercials and a number of movies including “The Greatest Showman” and the upcoming “The King’s Daughter.”

“We’ve been keeping busy, doing lots of digital work, whether it’s for feature films or commercials, anything related to digital CGI characters,” says Helms. “In between all of those jobs, we somehow managed to create “The Pig on the Hill.”

“The Pig on the Hill,” based on the picture book by John Kelly, is a short animated film about a quiet, privacy-loving pig whose life is upended when an extraverted and gregarious duck builds a house right next door. The film screens this weekend at the Mill Valley Film Festival as part of an animated shorts program titled “As the World Toons.” This will mark the 40th (or so) film festival that “The Pig on the Hill” has appeared in since it was released in 2018.

“I feel like, with Mill Valley Film Festival, we’re winding down the festival thing,” says Helms. “This is a good one to kind of go out on. It’s a great festival. It’s close to home, for one thing. It being in Marin, which is my back yard, that’s pretty great.”

The whole adventure began when Helms and Wheless were introduced to author Kelly (“The Robot Zoo” and “Everyday Machines”) through Iain Morris of Petaluma’s Cameron + Company publishing, which used to have its offices down the hallway from where Lightstream still holds down its own fort.

“Iain was adamant that this book was something special, and he showed it to us, and we said, ‘Well, let‘s give it a shot setting this story to animation,’” says Wheless. “So we put together a kind of rough, sketched-out edit to the narration of the book, as a template. It worked pretty well. So we threw together some temp music, and Iain did the temp narrator voice. But, of course, later we replaced his temporary voice with Pierce.”

By Pierce, he means actor Pierce Brosnan, best known as James Bond in several films from that series, and a number of other projects including “The Matador,” “Dante’s Peak,” “Mamma Mia” and “The Lightning Thief” (in which he played a teacher/centaur). Brosnan contributed the narration and the voices to “The Pig on the Hill.” He has been actively engaged in promoting it as an example of what Lightstream Animation is capable of. As for how the one-time 007 came on board, Wheless says it wasn’t that difficult, given his filmmaker daughter dates Brosnan’s son.

“They were in his house, in the kitchen, about a year ago, and my daughter Avery was showing Pierce’s wife Keely our movie,” Wheless recalls. “She loved it, and called Pierce over, who watched it and said, “That’s adorable. Who did that?’ and when they said it was Avery’s dad, Keely said, ‘You should help them out. You should do the voice for this.’” And the next thing I knew, we were down in L.A. recording Pierce, through another very talented man, Matthew Wilder, who composed the music for the short.”

Wilder, by the way, wrote some of the songs for Disney’s “Mulan,” and recruited a couple of dozen of his musician friends to perform the score for “Pig on the Hill.”

“It’s been kind of amazing,” says Helms, “all the elements that came together to make this happen.”

Not this it’s ever been easy.

“We bootstrapped it, basically and made the film off the profits of anything we made in terms of work,” says Wheless.

“It’s definitely been a long process,” says Helms. “We were working on a film called ‘The King’s Daughter,’ animating a mermaid, and at that time there were animators in the studio helping to create a digital live-action mermaid. And in between the cracks and the breaks, we were doing animation on ‘The Pig on the Hill.’”

“The ‘Pig on a Hill’ short film was part of our goal to put together a cohesive story that we could market to show we can create great stories, nd family friendly films,” explains Wheless. “That’s always been our goal, to make animated feature films, episodic TV series, brands and characters that we create and then use in a variety of projects.”

The pair are currently talking to distributors about a possible “Pig on the Hill’ episodic series or a feature film. Helms has gone so far as to write a full-length script expanding the story, and they’ve got a lot of ideas for a possible animated TV series.

“It’s a pretty simple and appealing story, this unlikely friendship between Pig and Duck,” says Wheless. “How to get along and maintain friendships in spite of difference. The characters are easy to understand. An extrovert and an introvert. There are endless possibilities of stories we could tell with these two.”