What is the film about?

“Ultimately, life is only 700,000 hours long so we have to make sure the ideas we need don’t get lost – or take too long to find.” – Alain de Botton

This is what the The School of Life does, they sift through the most valuable parts of culture, then mine, extract, and remould it into practical advice to help us maintain our sanity in modern day life.

To read more on cultural mining: thebookoflife.org/cultural-mining/
To find out more about The School of Life: theschooloflife.com/london/

CREDITS
Written & Narrated by: Alain de Botton
Directed & Animated by: Wednesday
Background Design by: Daniel Clarke
Sound & Music by: Tom Drew
3D Animation by: Grant Henderson
Additional Animation by: Yu Ka Hei Knifeson
Additional Compositing by: Jae Ho Hwang
Additional Cleanup by: Yu Ka Hei Knifeson & Nishanth Sanjay
Production assistance by: Agile Films

What influenced it?

We have never worked with an illustrator before, we love designing and normally always did it ourselves. However, we’d always wanted to collaborate with another designer, which is how we came around to working with the brilliant Daniel Clarke for this. We’d always been a fan so it’s amazing to be able to work with someone you admire.

A little background information...

We’ve been big fans of Alain’s School of Life videos and talks, so we jumped at the opportunity to make this. We find the content fascinating and enjoyed having plenty of creative freedom with the visuals.

How was the film made?

The animation is digital hand-drawn, with some CGI elements, and the backgrounds are hand-made and arranged digitally. We had a great team helping us out, it was a labor of love!