What is the film about?

Malcolm Fetcher is a neurotic, middle-aged teacher lost in a dull marriage with his wife of twenty years, Beverly. As he faces an all-consuming identity crisis, their marriage disintegrates and he is forced to express a deep, hidden desire…

What influenced it?

I always wanted to tell a grippingly awkward, darkly comic and crazy story for a mature audience that misses animated adult television series such as ‘Monkey Dust’ and ‘Stressed Eric.’ At the moment, we don’t have ongoing successes coming from the UK such as ‘South Park,’ ‘BoJack Horseman,’ ‘Rick and Morty’ and the kinds of innovative and creative shows on Adult Swim. I was really interested in the idea of rooting animated characters in a mundanely familiar and accessible live-action world, and took inspiration from ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ and ‘The Amazing World of Gumball.’ So with its very British and dark sense of humour, we made ‘TWEOTS’ as a tribute to long absent, mainstream British adult series.

A little background information...

Off the back of animated graduation films from the National Film & Television School becoming bigger and bolder, I wanted to do something that the NFTS had not produced before: 2D animated characters seamlessly interacting with full scale live-action backgrounds. My background is 2D animation, but I wanted to take the opportunity to direct a live-action shoot (albeit a strange one without actors for much of the time). I also wanted to make an audience squirm… then laugh… and then squirm some more, but still be engaged with the characters and Malcolm‘s clumsy journey. It’s always a lot of fun listening to the groans, gasps and nervous giggles spreading through the audience in a screening. And since it was going to be a graduation film, it would be a calling card for the kinds of things I would love to continue making in the future. I had to go out with a bang!

How was the film made?

For ‘TWEOTS’ to really work, it was incredibly important to create engaging, down-to-earth human characters that audiences could really embrace through the moments of surprise testicles and horny dogs expressing their natural urges. Animation-wise, that meant no squash and stretch or cartoony performances: just subtle, understated animation and plenty of awkward staring.

To really place the 2D animated characters into a real world, I thought it would be a great idea to have them interact with real objects! For these moments, we filmed stand-ins wearing blue suits eating toast and drinking tea, and then partly rotoscoped the animation. In other shots, we pulled the tablecloth with long bits of string and poked things about with sticks, which had to be painted out later. We created a modular set where walls could be moved to not only create different rooms, but also two distinct locations (Malcolm and Beverly’s home, and the Furry party flat). We had to be very economical with our angles and shot count to move the set around as little as possible and to be able to cram the shoot into two weeks, which included time to rearrange the set, repaint and redress the entire thing. We also shot at a local school during a weekend.

Animation production took place over about 11 months, but compositing, lighting and casting characters’ shadows onto the live-action environments became an incredibly demanding task in ensuring the 2D characters fitted seamlessly into the real world and took place over the course of the last seven months or so. In total, ‘TWEOTS’ took about 18 months from development through to delivering our film to Animafest Zagreb.