Tuesday 20 December 2011

The Benefits of Collaboration (Part One)

Over the last few weeks I've been working on a collaborative project with 'Moving Image' Student Sarah Brewster. She asked if I could create some illustrations that she could animate as part of her project. I jumped at the chance straight away as I have been wanting to do animation for a while now and this was the perfect opportunity.

She asked me to produce two characters and various elements that she could then animate into an advert. The advert she was making was a drink called 'Feel Good' and her concept was to create an advert as part of a campaign, a campaign in which iconic scenes from classic films are changed to include the drink 'Feel Good'. For this advert she had chosen the film 'The Shining' (1980) and the famous scene in which the insane Jack Torence chops down a door with an axe so that he might kill his wife, Wendy Torence. The scene has gone down as a classic and has been parodied by numerous people (including 'The Simpsons'), it is a scene that even if you haven't seen the film you will inevitably have seen it elsewhere, this is why it was such a good scene for Sarah to choose.


In the advert Sarah planned to recreate the part with Jack chopping down the door and saying the now oft-quoted phrase "Here's Johny" with Wendy screaming on the other side. In this version of the scene, however, Jack breaks through the door only to then walk past Wendy towards a bottle of 'Feel Good'. Once he has downed the the drink his mood changes from one of raging insanity to one of happy contentment. Thanks to 'Feel Good', Jack now feels good.

Sarah wanted me to re appropriate these characters in my style. It might seem like an odd choice to use my cartoony and naive style to recreate a scene from a horror film but that was part of the idea, it would make the scene funny from the start.

Once Sarah explained all of this me she gave me a brief and a storyboard, we agreed on a deadline and I set to work on what would turn out to be my favourite project of the year so far.

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