Universities UK

Synopsis

A short turn-around 90 second info-film for Universities UK promoting Research and Innovation across the UK University world

Production Details

Client

Universities UK

Pictures For The People (Patrick Lowney, Sami Larabi)

Production Company

Music

Scratch music Audio Network/John Ashton Thomas

Talent

Iris Le Fevre (scratch VO)

A very quick turnaround (one week pre-production and about three weeks production), low-budget corporate film produced by an ex UCA student Patrick Lowney and Sami Larabi for Pictures For The People (a great Social Enterprise production company, have a browse at their work).

At some point I hope to upload the pitch and production development as it was a great opportunity to catalogue how a short-form corporate commission works but for the moment it's just the film.

Corporate Film

Production Details

Production Schedule, Shot List and Voice record notes

I thought it might be helpful to students to see the layout of the job, what a short turnaround looks like and a bit of the process that I went through to make it on my own.

I keep forgetting that these are the kinds of things I take for granted when I've been doing it for so long.

I got an email from Patrick Lowney, ex UCA student, on May 31st 2023 asking if I could help him "...sourcing animators (or anyone you recommend that's free to work atm)?"

I happen to have had a large-ish job fall through so was thinking of engaging in the Industry so said I was free and it turned out they had a job which needed to be done soon so we arranged a chat on Zoom on June 2nd.

Below is the final schedule, shot list and voice notes that accrued through the job. I actually had to get this together for my self to figure out if I could do it but it was also a useful thing to share with Pictures for the People just so we were all aware of what the essential dates were.

They got juggled about a bit but it was pretty good engagement with the client too.

Week 0
Pre-production

Having realised that they were actually looking for a director not an animator, it transpired that they had a script, some reference imagery (stock generic graphic art, very nicely done but very much current popular styling) and PftP had made plenty of these corporate films with similar styling before.

Sami was at pains to say this might not be the kind of thing that's on my level having seen all of the films I made with Nexus but that was totally cool and I was well aware of the type of job and the balance of budget vs amount of effort.

To be honest it was a lovely simple project which knew what it wanted to be so it looked like a lot of fun to get working.

PITCH

I had a couple of days travelling over the weekend so I spent a lot of time sketching in my sketchbook, problem solving some of the (many) interesting things I could do.

I got together a deck with my thoughts of the characters, movement and styling and with the help of PftP whittled it down to the deck below...

A couple of days were spent pushing the idea forward waiting for the client feedback - to be honest it was quite obvious what was needed and their comments which appeared a few days later after the weekend coincided with a lot of what I had been working on so I sent an updated design document.

Sami suggested holding back on things like the animatic but I personally like to find the shape of the film as soon as possible as time was of the essence.

There were a few specific things that needed to be done regardless of how they felt the character and styling looked like such as rigging the characters and getting some of the graphic elements working and all of this working provided information to enrich the next document to give us all a good idea of how things would feel.

None of this was wasted work for them or me.