Freeview / Set yourself free

Story

We met with Leo Burnett’s creative team and began the process of fleshing out the story with them. They were extremely open to collaboration, allowing us to bat ideas back and forth and explore various different story avenues. What soon became clear was that the most compelling part of the story was the relationship between the good television, and the girl. Their journey, and their budding friendship provided a counterpoint to the evil regime, and an emotional backbone to our story. We put together an animatic that laid out our vision for the script.

At this point we were joined by Sam Brown, who became the third director on our team. Sam bought a wealth of experience to bear on the project. His energy, warmth, and a fresh set of eyes were greatly appreciated, and we learned a huge amount from working with him. As well as storyboarding all three of the companion films, Sam helped us extending the launch film from one minute to two, tightening the script and augmenting it with many of his own ideas.

Character Design

We were extremely lucky to have an incredible team of visual development artists on this job. We had a great number of characters to design in a very short period of time. In all our team ended up producing over 700 individual designs during the period of preproduction. We started with very rough sketches, loose, impressionistic renderings that capture the spirit of a character, their styling and silhouette. This would then be handed to a 3d artist to sculpt, to continue to develop into the final model you see on screen.

Frederik The Dog

A loyal companion to our main character, a bundle of joy with a frantic energy and endless curiosity. Manddy Wyckens and 3D modeller extraordinaire, Frederik Storm helped us design this character.

Hero TV

Probably the biggest challenge of all of the characters was this one. What do you do when essentially, your character is one big glowing rectangle. We went through hundreds of different versions of this guy in search for our perfect hero.

For the art direction of the film we wanted something that would combine a charm and handmade quality with a sense of cinematic scale and atmosphere. What we landed on was the idea of replicating a model world inside the computer, complete with all the imperfections of stop motion animation. We had been keen for some time to combine our design skills with Electric Theatre’s uncanny ability to make computer generated things look real, and this project provided the perfect opportunity for us to combine our specialist skills.

While we were pursuing a realistic approach, it was important to us that there was a strong, underlying sense of design throughout. Bjorn-Erik Aschim led the environment design for the project. He developed an aesthetic that caricatured reality with a kind of crooked, off-kilter cartooniness. This aesthetic had to be rolled out, and kept consistent in every detail of the film, from the smallest prop to the largest exterior location.

We were sure that we wanted the environments to have a distinct sense of place. The location of the film had to be set somewhere that felt like a typical mid-size British town. We went to work in earnest assembling all the reference we could find. Luckily for us we were designing a world that looked very similar to the world on our doorstep, we started noticing the world around us with greater detail than before. Journeys to and from work became research trips, as we snapped images of victorian terraces, post boxes, lamp posts, cars, busses, and trees.