WATCH: Joseph Wallace sends viewers to sleep with his latest hand-crafted film for BBC
Skwigly
Having previously worked their magic on a spooky christmas promo for the BBC, stop motion director Joseph Wallace and creative director Yoav Segal (Atime Works) have reunited create an evocative and soporific brand film for the BBC’s ASMR hit podcast The Sleeping Forecast.
‘Need a Good Sleep?’ – the stop frame advert features a diverse cast of characters being lulled to sleep by the podcast. It’s brought to the screen with a bold theatrical aesthetic created using puppets and models against coloured cycs with animated lighting bringing life to the scenes. It’s the 100th anniversary of the Shipping Forecast, which the Sleeping Forecast derives from, so there are nautical easter eggs throughout for the canny viewer.
Image: Atime Works
The creative team includes some of UK’s best stop motion talent. Joseph Wallace is BAFTA long-listed for his critically acclaimed film Salvation Has No Name. Yoav Segal is BAFTA long-listed for his title sequence for Once Upon a Time in Londongrad. DOP Malcom Hadley has worked on Chicken Run 2, The House and Isle of Dogs and Steve Warne animated on Isle of Dogs and Guilermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio.
Image: Atime Works
For this brand film the aim was to make something calm and relaxing whilst at the same time being inclusive and relatable. The stripped-back style was intentionally economic but also as the key artistic concept, to create an intimate vignette, a slightly dream-like state, where characters are in their own little worlds, listening to the podcast.
-Joseph Wallace, Director and Designer
Finding a way to bring the Sleeping Forecast’s calm, relaxed and meditative quality to the screen was a brilliant challenge and the resulting blend of theatrical simplicity, dynamic lighting and nuanced stop-motion acting was really satisfying to deliver.
-Yoav Segal, Creative Director and Producer