'Little Brother'

Little Brother from Chris Bradley on Vimeo.

The creation of the sets and characters.

As part of our coursework, fellow HNC Creative Media Production students and I were given the opportunity to animate, write and star in our own short clay animation as part of an outreach project produced by Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery. The film was commissioned as the centre piece of a new exhibition at the gallery based upon the theme of 'protest'. In order for it to be appropriate viewing for any visitor, limitations to what we could create were set. These included this theme of protest, a universal
subject matter and the exclusion of any age-restricting qualities. Over the course of eight three-hour sessions, we created a 5 minute short film regarding our modern surveillance society with the help of filmmaker Chris Bradley of Willowmann Productions.

The development of the narrative.

In our first couple of sessions we had to come up with a story that related to our theme. Later on it quickly became evident that a lot of this time would have been better spent on the production of the sets and filming. As per our shared viewpoint, the film quite clearly expresses an underlying message of anti-govenment mass surveillance. We chose this theme as not only did we feel it was historically relevant to the importance of protest, but that in recent years it has become also very contemporary due to the recent revelations of the bulk collection and surveillance capabilities of GCHQ and National Surveillance Agency of the US. However, upon reviewing the film, I noticed that there was an irony to it being funded by a council branch of the government itself. This became apparent towards the ending of the film, during the end-credit roll in which the museum added the line line 'The views expressed in this film are those of the students and not necessarily those of Nuneaton & Bedworth Borough Council'. Some of my contributions to the film included; the making of the park scenery, the formation of the tallest antagonist in this scene, creative advise for the story, coming up with lighting setups and animating the dog and duck models.

Prior to working on this project, none of the students had any experience in the production of clay animation. This proposed many challenges. Most significantly, and unsurprisingly, it turned out that the modelling of great-looking clay characters required a particularly high level of attention to detail alongside an understanding of the extraordinary craft involved in clay animation. In order to meet our tight deadline, instead of initially assigning specific filmmaking roles, we all had to take part in the production of the sets and characters. Despite having this limited time-frame which ultimately restricted our potential outcome, I nevertheless enjoyed the process and believe that overall, the film turned out to be much better than anticipated thanks to the combination of all of our aspects of filmmaking coming together in unity via the expert editing of Chris Bradley.