Little Brother

As part of an outreach project the HNC group are working with Nuneaton and Bedworth Museum & Art Gallery, and in particular Chris Bradley and Matt Johnson, to produce a stop-motion animated film with the thematic premise of protest. We had a brief introduction to the task and began brainstorming ideas. Mine, Dan and Elliot's idea was to make a film about the big brother society, after we had all presented our ideas to the group we decided that we move forward with a film based on the concept of a big brother society.

During the second session we focused on the narrative for the film and we also discussed characters we wish to use and as smaller groups set about deciding on the miss-en-scene for each of the settings used within the film. After this second meeting, we had decided on taking the big brother society literally and the film would follow a young boy and his older brother, this meant we could get on to working on the script.

In the third session we had our storyline set in stone and as such we could get started on creating characters and set designing. Again we were split into smaller groups amongst ourselves so that we could each be designated a particular setting to design, either the little brother's bedroom, the big brother's bedroom or the park. We chose the big brothers room and started designing it, we settled on a bed, desk, chair and bookcase as being essential to the big brother's room and storyline.

Session four consisted of further prop building, set design and characters. We got to work straight away on this and for the big brother's room not much more needed to be done, so we got to work on the script, this was primarily done by Joseph Weston, with input from myself, Liam Mulholland and Lalita Ajit, after the script had been completed we confirmed with both Matt and Chris that it would be okay and Chris made a few tweaks he felt were necessary. When this had been completed we had to record the voices for the characters, I personally voiced the little brother whilst others in the group voiced the big brother and other characters. 

All of the footage we had compiled and voice recordings were given to Chris who edited the final piece together in time for the premiere at the museum on the 4th December. Overall, this was a brilliant opportunity and working with a professional film maker, Chris, and a client, Matt, allowed me to expand on skills I already had but also challenged me to work to a much more professional level than before. Working with a group also allowed me to bounce ideas off other people and work on presenting my ideas to other people, I was very happy with the film produced and I think the final project is effective in showing how well we worked as a group together, Matt clearly thought the same as can be seen here by his feedback for the outreach project.