How did the idea come about to create this short animation?

A group of marketers, sound designers, creatives and myself were inspired by a recent caller, Darren, to the LBC radio show that gave an impassioned speech against the backdrop of far-right riots that were happening in the UK at the time. Something about the way he spoke, the turn of phrase and love that he had for his community and our country was so engaging we felt we had to pounce on it and bring his words to life in animation. Darren’s original call was made during the week and by Friday we had met and started production – it was a moment and message that needed to be captured and spread as far as possible.

When hearing Darren’s story, did specific visuals come to your mind?

Because we had very little time, we needed to land on an idea quickly that was both creatively efficient (I only had 48 hours to wrap up the project) and visually engaging. I sketched a few directions that focussed on typography and hand drawn scenes. I knew it needed to accent Darren’s voice and not take over and become the focal of the message – so early on I knew I wanted a very limited palette and a loose hand drawn style.

Originally, I was thinking about ways to avoid drawing Darren’s face directly as we didn’t know what he looked like and it felt risky to guess his appearance and get it wrong, so initially I thought about leaning into the phone call aspect and animating his voice bursting from a phone speaker. However when we talked about it we settled quickly on this idea of him being ‘the voice of everyone’ which gave us the freedom to abstract his face and also show a diverse cast of faces that make up the UK to create that sense of unity behind his words.

Can you share with us what your process was like in creating this animation?

The biggest challenge was the timeframe, we wanted to release it quickly, capture the energy and spread the message, so with that in mind I had 48 hours to animate a 3:40 audio recording – no small feat! This is where the pared back, humanistic approach came into play. 

I first started by combing through the script and quickly highlighting sections that worked as typographic scenes, talking head scenes and illustrated scenes.Then I spent time creating a series of mouth shapes that could be animated to track the movement of speech really quickly, once this was in place I blocked out of the talking head sections in the timeline and began to template out the typographic sections. Last came storyboarding the illustrated scenes that were there to bring life to some of Darren’s anecdotes – these 3 types of approach were integral to getting the animation finished on time for the sound designers to pick up. 

We had a few quick rounds of feedback to pick out some details we wanted to emphasise and enhance – and Monday morning we were done!

It was fast, it was intense, it was an experience and it was really rewarding. I’m very pleased with how it turned out in such a short amount of time and I learnt a tonne of new tricks to use in future projects.

What were the highlights for you in putting this together?

The first highlight is always seeing the playback and seeing it come together, there’s always a point in every project where you realise ‘yep, this is going to work!’ For me it was after the first 50 seconds of the animation which I used as a proof of concept for the gang, where I was confident in the choice of direction and illustrative approach – it’s always a gamble but you reach that point and it clicks, it’s the best feeling!

The second highlight is seeing it out in the wild and seeing strangers connect and share it, watching it spread and feeling it reach people is a hard emotion to quantify but it feels great to see people enjoy it and find meaning in it. The support we’ve seen from it has been amazing, we’ve had people clip it, repost it and even a few musical remixes of it – the community has really rallied around it and been a huge factor in pushing it far and wide with over 300,000 views in the first few weeks.

What do you hope viewers come away with?

Darren had such a poignant point of view it’s hard not to come away feeling hopeful about the state of the world – I hope viewers come away from watching the short film feeling a positivity and have taken his words to heart enough to apply them in their daily life because ultimately it doesn’t matter how different each of us are, we’re all in it together.

I also hope viewers can also feel the passion that all of us had for the project when we were creating it. It was such a lovely project to be involved in and one that means a lot to me too. It was a labour of love that we all felt very strongly about creating together.

Would you like to create more animations like this?

Yes! Both in method and meaning – I loved illustrating in this style and animating people and stories in this way and I would also love to create more meaningful short films just like this. Short films that try to resonate. And I have plans for a few more similar projects this year!