At the beginning of my third year of University, my good friend Reuben Fuest and I were task as part of a 12 week advertising project to create a sting for television company. There were some great entries by the final hour from the class, with the E4 logo showing up in many, including our own. From dogs dreaming they were cowboys to Foxes floating through space because of the power of music to two kids thumbing away at a particularly intense beat-em-up game, there was some cracking entries!
Then there was ours, cutely named "How to Survive an Apocalypse", and idea so ambitious and frankly stupid to pull off that the fact we actually managed to do it is something I'm still getting my head around today. The project was stressful, close, and with more than it's fair share of late nights and early morning but it got done, and is still to this day a piece of work I am very proud of despite often regarding my finished work with contempt for what they could have been! Is it flawed? Oh yes! I can spot a thousand problems in the short 30 seconds but something exists that didn't 12 weeks prior and that something was fun and energetic and slightly bizarre but none the less tangible. No small part of that was down to Reuben, a talented and hilarious animator that had the impossible task of bringing our world to life and some how translating the wacky 2D style of animation we wanted into something we could render.
It got me thinking recently though whilst discussing the project with a friend about all the ideas we canned. Granted, there was a very short window for pre-production before we actually committed to development but Reuben and I drew up a couple of dumb ideas in the time we had and I thought it might be fun to share them!
How To Survive An Apocalypse? RUN! There was a nuclear theme to a lot of the projects we drew up but this was the image that started it all and I think it encapsulates the idea. Two dinosaurs, one big and sharp, the other round and small, butting heads over who is gonna make it whilst the world burns down around them; a rivalry that would ultimately doom them!
This short skit was definitely in the same vein as HTWAA, with a disgruntled doomsday preacher yelling gibberish into the faces of passers by and being overjoyed with excitement with the bombs finally dropped. This too would have been an E4 advert with the cloud itself shaping into the logo post-apocalypse. It was fun, though I think the dumb art style was what really sold it for me at least with the big jagged mouth very much an homage to the likes of Rayman Legends. It would have been technically unachievable, though I think it the time we had, the crowd sim a lone would eat into production time with myself as the only artist being shackled with creating enough characters to realistically make a crowd. The nuke explosion did survive however and make it over to the end product.
The lonely astronaut concept very much sought to ape the Christmas adverts that pull at your heart strings every festive season with an lone rocket man stranded on a little big planet styled rock with a friendly alien that just wants the poor guy to have a good Christmas. It was sweet, and I think very doable in the time too, with only four major assets really being needed (one of which was a rock so...) and the astronaut design, though nothing wholly original, is definitely something I'd like to revisit down the road.
This is what happens when two childish kindred spirits are given a couple hours, a warm sun and a walk around the park to come up with advert ideas; it devolves into madness. What started as a quaint joke about a slightly sinister talking sheep spiralled into a more and more elaborate mythos involving a sheep invasion, the titular 'Dave' being the unfortunate every man shackled with this sheep's torments night after night. The concept itself was actually quite simple: A man who can't sleep gets given a sleeping aid by a sheep who's calm demeanour and unflinching stare is just slightly off putting. Although a reference that still gets us laughing to this day, the idea was abandoned as it would be made or broken by compositing a photo realistic sheep into mostly still lip sync which went against almost every tickbox Reuben and I has as respectively a children's TV and feature animator and a games artist.
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