A Productions Produce Short Animation For New Education Charity
A local charity in the South West of England has commissioned a short animated film to explore the relationship between young children and adolescents’ learning abilities.
‘Born to Learn’ is a short animated film narrated by actor Damien Lewis and is intended to challenge the conventional use of resources in English schools. The 21st Century Learning Initiative hope that by producing animations of this kind it will “create an attractive and persuasive alternative picture of what should be an appropriate way to bring up children” says the charities president, John Abbott.
Abbott is a former comprehensive school headteacher, and is now the leader of an international research foundation. He states that “’Born to Learn’ explores the relationship between young children’s natural, almost clone-like learning abilities, and adolescents’ deep need to work things out for themselves.”
The charity hope that by raising awareness about alternative means of education children they can put pressure on the government to implement educational reform.
Jane Davies from A Productions in Bristol was in charge of producing the film. Speaking to Animation News she admits that although she hadn’t heard of The 21st century Learning Initiative before the commission, Abbott’s book “resonated with me on a lot of points, as someone who is dyslexic and struggled at school with the non-creative subjects.”
She told us that the brief they were given was “fairly open stylistically; we were given some animations of reference as to what they were aiming for. So I came up with a style and process that would be achievable to get across what they had intended within the time and budget.” She adds that “John was also very specific in certain areas on how the message should be portrayed.”
Jane explained that she didn’t want the film’s animation to distract from the message. She used a combination of Flash to animate and After Effects to do the effects, camera moves and compositing. The animatic and sounds were completed in Final Cut. She adds “I thought the devise of moving to different sections and seeing how they interweave would be interesting. I did intend for additional things to be going on but ultimately you have to try your best to get specific things done for the client, as they have to be happy with it.”
One of the biggest challenges A Productions faced was incorporating Damien Lewis’ pre-recorded audio track into the final piece. Jane explains that they “had to use a scratch audio track as Damien Lewis wasn’t available until late February.” Once his voice was recorded she had re-time the whole piece and do some general re-jigging.
It took Jane and her team of eight staff about eight weeks to produce the completed film. You can watch it in full here.