Film Club director has designed and directed the short animated film 'Losing The Plot' for Childline and BAFTA Kids' Vote.

The story was the winning entry in the create and make story competition run by Childline and BAFTA Kids' Vote. Owain aged 12 won the competition with his winning story. His prize was for Film Club to turn his story into an animated film.

The piece was created using hand drawn animation, and aided with After Effects to composite the final film.

This signature design style is the detail and intricate textural patterns. It was important to keep those intricate details. We also wanted to retain the quality of some of the winners original storyboard so we decided to give the film a cut out feel. This way we could keep all of those details.

Since animation using after effects works by building up layers each part of her character was given its own layer. So an arm a leg a head etc and we drew replacements for when the character turned. We buit each character and then moved it for each shot so we had a lot of different movements different actions for each of the characters. The next thing was to build each shot from the pre comps of the actions. We then built secondary comps with 2 or 3 of the characters together. The last thing was to add the back grounds. Adding the action into the setting.

We created a dimension or depth with the plants so some plants were in the foreground and some in the back ground. We now had complete shots with all characters in a setting.

Next thing was to add colour. We wanted only minimal colour of key elements and since one of the key story elements is that the boy goes back to the allotment at night we thought that the skies where a central feature of the story and so we decided to keep only the sky as full colour.

So after the spot limited colour of plants and leaves we added the sky.

Each sky is subtly moving like in real life, the clouds will move. AE is great at allowing the control of the movement, and brought to life the beautifully hand drawn elements.

We had a tricky job when it came to adding the hand drawn animation so that it sat neatly into the project and didn't jump out too much