The Fabric comes Alive!
Fri, Oct 9th 2009, 13:24
I don’t want to go on about the BAFTA thing (yeah! BAFTA BAFTA BAFTA), but while at the 2009 film BAFTAs, when we were nominated for a BAFTA at the BAFTAs, we met fellow BAFTA nominees (and former BAFTA winners) Marc Craste and Sue Goffe from the amazing BAFTA winning studio aka.
This year wasn’t our year because the legendary Nick Park was out and about and claimed the gong for Wallace and Gromit. But it did mean we’d got to commiserate with Marc and Sue and a little while later they asked to work with them on a project.
The Law Centres Federation runs centres around the UK which are not-for-profit legal practices providing free legal advice and representation to disadvantaged people. They wanted four short animations to explain what they did in a short and engaging way. So we worked on two of them and the very talented illustrator Chris Haughton worked on the others (you can see one on his YouTube channel).
We made one of the films in a style similar to our short film Codswallop. But for the other, we thought we’d have a go at something new. We’d had an idea about animating some fabric models and so, once we'd picked our story - about a family man overcoming a drug addition and volunteering at a law centre to get his life back on track - Greg starting sketching.
We then brought in friend and designer Asia Werbel of Colourspace to turn the sketches and illustrations into fabric models. She also created a fabric background complete with patchwork houses and button trees.
The finished models and background look fantastic and personally I think it creates a magical looking animated film. You can buy some of Asia’s handmade plushes and other designs on Etsy or at Uneeka.
The rest of the crew included the very talented animator Tom Evans, Paul Johnston from Rhythm Studios and the voiceovers for all the films came from Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty.
Here’s the finished animation.
