Blinkink’s Elliot Dear, the director behind last year’s John Lewis Bear and the Hare spot, has helmed BBC One’s Christmas 2017 short film The Supporting Act that will run throughout the Christmas period on the channel.
The two minute film follows a 10-year-old girl who practices day in and day out to give the most important dance performance of her life. Her dad is always with her but he’s busy, and getting even busier as Christmas approaches. He remains distracted up until the moment that really matters, when father and daughter come together in a moment of ‘oneness’.
The film was ordered through BBC Creative, the BBC’s in-house creative agency. Creatives were Arvid Harnqvist and Amar Marwaha working in to Executive Creative Directors Aidan McClure and Laurent Simon. It was produced by Ken Rodrigues.
The soundtrack for the campaign has been provided by Clean Bandit featuring Zara Larsson with Symphony, and it was specially re-arranged by producer Steve Mac.
The characters were animated using traditional stop-motion techniques with facial expressions mapped on to the puppets using CGI.
The puppets were made by MacKinnon & Saunders and the set builders were Clockwork Frog. The lead Animators were Dan Gill and Andy Biddle, DoP Toby Howell and the lead CGI artist was Rune Spaans (Trollhunters).
Elliot Dear fsaid: “The story is about an emotional connection between a girl and her dad. We wanted to make a film that had the charming, handmade qualities of stop-motion animation, the tiny imperfections that let you know it’s been done for real. The aim was to combine this with CG animation – which we used for the faces – in order to capture the tiny nuances of human facial expressions, enabling the characters to be very emotive without the use of dialogue.”
Blinkink
Director – Elliot Dear
Executive Producer – Bart Yates
Senior Producer – Benjamin Lole
Production Manager – Alex Holberton
Jon Creamer
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