What is the film about?

A little character called Big annoys his friend Little in a big way when he finds a new toy to play with.

What influenced it?

Nicolas Menard, Mark Baker, Terry Brain, Stoppit and Tidyup, The Pink Panther, old UPS shorts, George Gendi and all the old VHS tapes my grandad used to sit me down in front of.

A little background information...

I like to make films based on my actual day to day life, about just being a ‘normal’ person, but kind of through the lens of a big kid. I had just moved in with my partner at the time and she’s incredibly tidy, and I’m not really, and we were getting on each other’s nerves quite a lot, and you end up in this weird place where your best mate is still your best mate but you basically don’t want to play with them any more…! So I wanted to transfer that into something colourful and useful.

How was the film made?

I spent a long time sitting in my lounge drawing and writing down conversations (disagreements) my partner and I had as a starting point. Once I had the character designs and storyboards sorted I worked up the character animations in Photoshop, and compositing in After Effects, using a combination of flat digital colour and textures scanned in from bits of paper, paint strokes, ink and the like.

Actually the most interesting part of the animation process was making the visual “music”, which combines lots of digital patterns with some traditional 35mm scratch animation; that involves taking a length of 35mm film and painting and scratching into it, then running it through a projector and treating it like stop-motion animation, photographing every frame. The audio was done by good friend (and multi-BAFTA-award-winning sound designer) Kenny Young, whose amazing audio work really brought the whole piece to life.