You can now buy Man In A Cat on DVD as part of The Best Of British Animation Awards 9. You can see the list of other festival-smashing films in the compilation HERE. The price looks steep but, since public funding cuts, the BAAs now rely solely on private sponsorship and the generosity of it’s supporters. So if you want to support the Arts AND own a snazzy DVD, this is pretty much your ideal situation.

What’s that? How did the Awards night itself go? Oh yeah… On March 15th we headed to the Southbank Centre, following the sound of hundreds of animators frantically scrubbing the food stains out of their trousers, with the creeping sense of excitement of being shortlisted for Best Short Film.

As you’d expect from a building full adult children it was a jolly night. The general mood was particularly heightened by the anticipation for the following day, when it would be declared whether the UK animation industry would get the much needed tax breaks that it had been lobbying for. It was a great to meet Oli Hyatt from Blue-Zoo who spearheaded the lobbying initiative and succeeded! A lot of people owe him a drink.

The Best Short Film award went to Grant Orchard‘s A Morning Stroll, but we did make the top four in the Public Choice vote. Clips shown from Man In A Cat also got the biggest laughs of the night, which is a prize in itself.

We were also really proud of homeboy Chris Randall for winning the Commercial Public Choice Award:

Good news! All Consuming Love (Man in a Cat) has been nominated as Best Animation at the Limelight Awards.

This means we’ll be suiting up and heading to the awards ceremony at Troxy next month with a chance of picking up a rather fetching statuette. If we win our category we’ll also be up for Film of the Night which carries a prize of a £10,000 production budget, which is nice. Here’s hoping.

Here’s some more about the Limelight Awards:

Limelight Film Awards is the annual short film competition, followed by a red carpet awards ceremony, attended by over 500 film makers, celebrities and TV/ Film personalities. In its fifth year, with 12 film categories and a £10,000 production award, Limelight is paving the way in identifying emerging British film makers while helping to strengthen the industry.

Go to our production page to find out more about All Consuming Love (Man in a Cat).

The project

We’re about to start working on a side project. It’s an animated comedy short again, but this time we’re working in a completely different way to how we’ve worked before. I won’t go into much detail about the content (because secrets are cool) but this post will hopefully give an insight into how we’re approaching this project from a writing perspective.

The film will be an animated adaptation of something originally written and recorded by Kevin Eldon, the voice of Yorkie in Man in a Cat and all-round comedy leg end. The audio Kevin has already recorded is hilarious, and being fans of both Kevin and laughing, Louis and I got in touch and suggested we turn his work into something new and visual. Luckily, the recording is one of Kevin’s favourites so the project got the green light and we’ll hopefully be making a funny short film from it.

Being an independent adaptation, the project has thrown up some interesting freedoms and limitations. We’re free because there’s no funding, no deadline, no brief, and no sign-off (apart from Kevin’s approval of course). However, we’re limited because there’s no funding, we’re adapting another writer’s work, and the dialogue is already recorded. So on one hand we can do what we want, and on the other we have to find the time and resource to get it made and work to a locked down set of audio recordings. Thankfully, the freedoms are outweighing any limitations at this stage.

Challenges

Despite having the dialogue already written and recorded there are several challenges on the writing front. First we have to cut down over 10 minutes of dialogue into a more palatable length for a short animated film. In doing so we have to keep the jokes and story intact, add a new ending without additional dialogue, and add visual gags and signposting to our new ending. We also have to create a whole visual world and language for the story that will be developed further through design and direction.

The first port of call when writing the adaptation is the original audio. We have no script to work from, so I listened to it many more times than I already had to absorb the characters, story, jokes, and feel of the material. I then transcribed the whole script from the audio, cutting out sections of exposition (descriptions of the setting etc) that could be replaced visually. This reduced the run-time significantly and started to create layers in which visual jokes popped off the dialogue and vice-versa.

The next phase was to cut the audio to match the new draft script. This presented the story in a new form and allowed me to listen for any continuity or pacing issues, but also allowed me to visualise the material from a new perspective and feed that back into the script, adding jokes or story points. This is as far as we’ve got. The next stage is to flesh out the script with visual direction, sight gags and build up the world that will guide the design process. We also need to lock down an ending.

Endings

In my opinion the ending is everything. Without an ending a story is not complete. It has to deliver the message (or messages) of the film whilst tying up all the loose ends and providing a satisfying and logical conclusion to what you’ve just seen. I think it’s telling that of the most successful shorts tend to be the ones with water-tight or surprising endings. We’ve identified what our ending needs to do and have several ideas, but the current task is to condense those themes into the most efficient and effective scene we can, being mindful of runtime and continuity.

As a side note, Kevin’s original recording doesn’t have a bad ending. It’s just that we’ve identified an opportunity to add a whole new satisfying conclusion that stays true to the spirt of the rest of the material. And it can be done without dialogue. Win. Handily, Kevin wants to be involved in the process, so we’ll be sending over script drafts to him for for his unique input into the visual side of the project.

The next steps

So once the edited dialogue, sight gags, and story is locked down the director/designer will take over. The writing process for animation is so important. ‘Reshoots’ (or re-draws perhaps) are expensive, time-consuming, and can throw continuity and pacing completely out of the window.

We’ll try to follow this post up with more production notes but we really don’t know how long the process will take. If you’d like to fund this endeavor or help out, then please do get in touch.

If you need any more convincing, Phallic is an oblivious plucky nerd who keeps being called things like “Wiener” by the school bully, Bonehead. His sidekick, Freud, provides the slapstick comedy by making obvious slips and silly phalluses. I mean mothers! Faces!!

Among all the hubbub we forgot to mention that Man In A Cat now has two new distributors. MagnetFilm is representing us Worldwide. Amongst their catalogue is the much acclaimed Something Left Something Taken. A week later Future Shorts got interested and now represent us in the UK. So that was nice.

For UK TV distribution enquiries contact: info@futureshorts.com

For worldwide TV distribution enquiries contact: georg.gruber@magnetfilm.de

You can contact us for all other distribution at: info@diceproductions.co.uk

CAST
Emma Pearce
Tom Reid

Written by Ian Ravenscroft
Direction, Editing, Sound Design – Louis Hudson
Sound – Dan McHugh
DOP – Alan Dolhasz
Colour Correction – Ed Lawes

Filmed at 6/8 Kafé, Birmingham, UK.

Big thanks to 144 for shooting and colour correcting.

Lighting supplied by Second Home Studios

Here’s a bonus behind the scenes snap taken by Craig at 6/8 Kafé

This means we’ll be going along to the glitzy awards ceremony at the BFI on March 15th. (See artist’s impression of the awards).

We’re also up for the BAA Public Choice award so if you see the film at a BAA screening be sure to vote for us! We’re hosting a Birmingham screening of the Public Choice films at The Custard Factory on 9, 10, 11 Febraury. You can book tickets for the screenings (which include a free drink courtesy of Light House) on our Eventbrite page at: baawardsbham.eventbrite.com

We’ve teamed up with Animation Forum WM and The Light House to host the British Animation Awards Public Choice screenings in Birmingham!

As part of the British Animation Awards, several voting screenings take place nationwide to decide the Public Choice Award. The programme is a mixture of BAA’s shortlisted short films, music videos and commercials made over the past two years. There are three programmes taking place and will be a great chance to meet other animators and filmmakers over a free drink.

The screenings will take place from 7pm on 9th, 10th and 11th February at The Custard Factory Theatre, Digbeth.

You can buy your tickets below or go to the Eventbrite Page and check out the full listings there.

As you would hope the line up looks incredibly strong and I can’t wait to see some festival winners that I’ve missed so far. On Saturday 11th, the Brummie massive will be representing, with Man In A Cat and Second Home’s Pilsner Urquell advert competing.

Here’s some stills from the programmes:

It was a lovely surprise to have won and it really justifies the hard work of everyone involved in getting the film made, especially Louis who put more into Man in a Cat than anyone. Obvious thanks go to the festival for selecting the film, and LoCo Film Festival for selecting us as winner in our category. We couldn’t have done it without the backing of UK Film Council, Screen WM, and producer Jon Petrie who helped to secure our awesome voice cast of Kevin Eldon, Josie Long, and Isabel Fay.

It’s great that LSFF even had a comedy award in the programme. Most festivals don’t so it’s brilliant to be recognised for making a funny film when that is what we set out to do. Now we need to decide what to do next, so that’ll be fun. You can see all the shortlisted films and winners on the LSFF website.