Shambles - A Climate Change Animation

Utter Shambles

What a complete and utter shambles the situation was. Last October 2019, I was sat outside Westminster Abbey inside of a stranger’s tent whilst a police officer read me my rights for failing to observe a section 14. Like most of the XR protestors I was put in a local cell for a short time and released without charge.

Moments before the arrest, to beat the boredom of mass public protest, I was checking emails on my phone to see how our animation jobs were progressing. One of said jobs was a set of training videos for a well-known British fossil fuel company. On the same day at the protest another Grizzle artist had been arrested for gluing herself to something large and immovable – she too had contributed on the training video animation.

If there is such a thing a thing as the opposite of a mic drop moment – this was it.

Making Changes

We made changes as immediately as we could. We could not (and never would) leave our client, a great little communications agency, in the lurch - so we finished the training videos but let them know that we could not take any more work for clients on in the fossil fuel field. They were great – fully supportive of our actions and wished us well. It wasn’t a decision I took lightly but ultimately it was a decision which had to be made.

Since then we have been using animation as a force for good. We have created pro bono animations for companies in the carbon neutral sector and we’re actively searching more to get involved with.

Although we made this video almost 6 months ago, there has never felt like a good time to show it until now. As we start to creep out of lockdown I’m optimistic that despite the turmoil that C19 has imparted on the world – there is hope for our planet and the changes we need to adopt to create a brighter future for our little ones.  

Pro Carbon Capture

There is wide debate over the use of Carbon Capture as an effective method in the fight against climate change. Some see it as a get out clause. I hear people’s arguments, and would agree to small amount but I also think it’s far too useful a tool not to be championing. Along with being pro reforestation and pro renewables the film is designed to be unashamedly pro carbon capture too.

How it was done

I made this film with Freddie Littlewood at Grizzle. It was a studio love project that got a bit out of hand taking about 4 months to fully complete. The film from a technical standpoint was an exploration into the rendering powers of Redshift using super macro cameras to miniaturise the aesthetic. All DOF was handled inside of Redshift.

The characters were created in C4D with a little bit of help from Adobe Fuse and Mixamo. The smoke simulations were made using TurbulenceFD and rendered using Redshift. All comped inside of After Effects.