CITV’S Share a Story Presents “Granny Margaret Who Blows Off A Lot”
Granny Margaret Who Blows Off A Lot is undeniably one of the more surreal and anarchic projects that make up this year’s CITV Share a Story competition. Written and narrated by young winner Liza Hammond and animated by production duo Kluncklick, the minute long story of a leisurely car journey that leads to the titular Granny Margaret bottom-burping her way through the roof of her little red car, flying through space and landing on the sun is LOADS of fun. The fact that it ends with the Earth never seeing the Sun again because of Granny Margaret’s flatulence is proof that a child’s imagination is a wonderful thing when left to run riot.
I got to interview Kluncklick [Ian Rainford and Wayne Large] in the run up to release of the short.
How was the Kluncklick partnership initially formed?
We met at Night & Day Cafe in Manchester, where we both, sort of worked, hung out and played, both in bands and involved with bands. Having done various projects involving making stage projections/videos for our respective bands; we started getting asked to make videos for other people. So, we ended up making quite a few music-videos, doing animation by default really, as we had either very small budgets or no budget at all.
How did this lead to you joining the Share a Story project?
The knock on effect from making promo-videos for the likes of “i Monster”, “Bobby Conn”, “Alfie”, “Jane Weaver”…the list goes on, was that we were asked to do an animation for the American kids show “Yo Gabba Gabba”, working on the Halloween special, which moved us away from pop-videos and into Children’s TV. We made an ident last year for Mini-CITV called, “The Haircut Song” which led to us being asked to join the judging-panel for this year’s competition.
What were your initial reactions to such a funny title?
We really liked the story because of its bleak, apocalyptic ending. To tell you the truth, when we went in to judge the stories most were about underpants and farting anyway. Kids are weird aren’t they?
How much input did you receive from Liza?
We received a Script and basic storyboard and voice-over from Liza, which we stuck to as closely as possible, anything we thought needed adding or taking away was ran by her as often as we could.
How did the project deadlines affect your planning for the short?
It was a pretty tight schedule, we decided early on in the project that we’d really like a go at stop motion, but wanted to use software that was available for free online, the idea being to show that it was possible to make something that didn’t cost the earth and was totally affordable for a child to have a go at, if they wanted, so having looked online we sourced some programs that would be suitable and free.
We ended up using Helium Frog Animation and Monkey Jam, along with a basic time-line editor, the only thing we had to buy was a £40 HD Web Camera and modelling materials, we mainly used Das for the figures, making silicone moulds of the heads and casting them in plaster to make heads with different expressions, (Granny ended up with ten).
How did the Kluncklick partnership function on the short? Do you each focus on individual skill-sets or do you share tasks?
The model-making and storyboarding is discussed between us and then Ian sets to work, while I [Wayne] work out the Technical stuff of how to make them move. We both work on the animation.
What’s next for Kluncklick?
As we are both huge fans of Oliver Postgate and Cosgrove Hall, and are very much inspired by all the weird and wonderfully trippy stuff we watched as kids, this is a path we want to continue on, warping the childrens’ minds of the future!
Granny Margaret Who Blows Off A Lot, written by Liza Hammond and animated by Klunc Klick will air on the CITV channel and ITV Player as part of Share a Story from the 28th October 2013.