May 29, 2019
One million stitches and 5km of thread.
This article is a deep dive into the creation of 'In Stitches', a short animated children's film created for Sesame Studios.
It is a fun little story about following the journey of a boy who learns that by using your imagination you can have fun playing with any old thing; you don't need the latest toys.
Watch the full film here
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_IRBBn8UUbA
This short was the first commercial animation I made, and it was only made possible thanks to my family and some close friends. It's a pretty low-fi piece mode on a shoestring budget, but each person who help me brought so much skill.
In July 2017 I woke up to an email I couldn't ignore. It was from Sesame Workshop. A previous piece I had made (Embroidered Zoetrope) had been shared within their office and they were interested in the technique. They were interested in it for Sesame Studios, a recent initiative where they commission original children's content for YouTube.
A Skype call and a few emails later, I was invited to pitch in their next RFP.
The RPF included a few different categories to encourage submissions in different styles and media types.
Among those categories was 'non-lingual animation'.
This category really appealed to me, firstly because by placing importance on the technique and style of animation, it made sencse to also make the story have an emphasis on visual storytelling and characteristics. Secondly, it seemed like a worthwile challenge to not use any one language and instead open the story up to children of different ethnicities.
I'm not a writer, and I definitely felt out of my depth trying to invent a compelling story. In one particular instance, my girlfriend, sister and I went for a walk for the specific purpose of discussing and generating new ideas for the story.
All we had to go on was the idea that the embroidery had to be more than just an aesthetic, it had to mean something to the story and contribute to the message.
After throwing around a few wild ideas like using the thread as the texture for a scruffy dog, and various discussions about facial hair, these various seeds started to sprout into a single coherent story.
The embroidery could be used for a particular object in the story, and as the importance of that object begins to be realised, more and more of the scenery would begin to adopt the embroidered texture.
When I heard my pitch had been approved, I was equal parts thrilled and nervous. I'd never created a film before, let alone an animated film with all the technical considerations that entails. I knew I needed to scale up quickly, so I brought on my high school mate Hew Sandison. Hew is a man of many talents, among them filmmaking, screenwriting and sompositing. For this project I asked him first and foremost if he could join as my producer to help me make sense of all the planning and paperwork that had to be done.
I must say this project had it's fair share of good calls and bad, but bringing on a producer, especially the likes of Hew was easily one of the best calls I made early on.
Straight off the bat, Hew helped me sharpen up this production with a schedule and appropriate paperwork, and then his talent for screenwriting started to shine.
Sesame were really happy with the outline, and I was lucky to receive no significant notes of the story, but the next steps was to flesh out a complete script.
With the animation being non-lingual, Hew suggested and helped write an AV Script to document each shot of blow-by-blow.
This had to be readdressed a few times, with some of the priority changes realting to how child friendly some of the actions in the imagination scenes would be.
Once the AV Script was approved, we moved onto storyboards. I started really rough with these by cutting up little thumbnail sized pieces of paper. I found it really freeing to do this on paper instead of on the computer. It helps me play a lot more with ideas and move shots around freely.
When I was happy with the general outline, I redrew the storyboard digitally and sequenced them into an animatic. This was really helpful because quite quickly Sesame identified a few issues, particularly around the environment the boy finds himself in the initial shots. The animatic is also a fantastic resource to get a sense of pacing. I was able to get some eyes on the animatic for some real time feedback
[photo of Rosie watching animatic on my phone]