Output details

The Age of Stupid

The research imperative in this work, a project with Spanner Films, was to use a range of animation styles and techniques to simply communicate a wide variety of complex concepts, including diverse historical events, political commentary and scientific theory in the context of a feature length ethical documentary about climate change. Hand drawn 2D character and location designs combined with photomontage formed the basis of animation. 2D imagery was digitized and composited into virtual 3D space to give a visual effect sometimes referred to as 21⁄2D.

Many documentaries have been made about climate change, however The Age of Stupid is unique in its framing of archive documentary footage and specially commissioned live action and animation in the context of a science fiction drama. The Age Of Stupid is a documentary-drama-animation hybrid about climate change. This completely independent film was one of the first feature films to be financed solely from crowd funding. It features on an old man living in the devastated world of 2055. He sifts through 'archive' footage of news and documentary from 1950-2008 to build an understanding of what went wrong. My contribution to the film was to direct three stand alone animated 'films', totalling about five minutes of animation, which were inserted into the montage of archive footage. The sequences needed to be stylistically diverse, giving the impression that they had been produced by three different directors and collected from a variety of sources. The film had a global cinema distribution through Dogwoof as well as being sold to numerous television networks, including the BBC.

The output is presented via portfolio, which should be viewed in order to gain a proper understanding of the research.