The Octocurse:
Octopuses are beautiful creatures. They also feel joy and excitement as well as pain and fear. But there are plans to build the world's first octopus farm in Gran Canaria. The problem is charities often have a finger waggy tone of voice. So how do you challenge people to rethink eating octopus without feeling like it’s yet another charity telling you off? We told the truth. We told people the octopus is cursed.
Stay Human. Don’t eat Octopus.
On Production:
We had twelve days to prep this and a very low budget because it was a charity job but we made sure that everyone got paid their day fee. This meant it was very hands on from the producer and project manager painting walls and doing the lights to sparks helping art department and vice versa. The director was working with the creatives re-writing scenes up to the day before because of the locations and props we were able to find. We had to build 20 shots and the idea was much bigger than our budget.
The prosthetics team had 10 days. The alien head had to be made without measurements as they hadn’t done the casting yet so on the day of the shoot they moulded it to the actor’s head. The octopus had to be guided with sound on the shoot because there were no eye holes. Ultimately it was about making everyone feel happy and relaxed to muck in. Which we did and it was a really fun shoot for production, client and agency.
Director, Jeff Low, on the project:
This was truly an homage to B movie / Ed Wood stuff and obviously the format was Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. Taking it all very seriously and leaving all the fun for the audience (as opposed to the characters in the film) was mostly what I felt made it work.
Lucie Red on the production design:
What appealed to me most about Jeff Low’s script for ‘The Octocurse’ was its capacity to communicate a serious message for PETA in a darkly comic, highly original and surreal way. To bring this script to life, we looked to contemporary socialist design and brutalist architecture as we felt this would suit the tone of the film and help emphasise the strangeness of the story. Our aim was for it to feel timeless, eerily familiar and for there to be a certain beauty in its bleakness. It’s like what everyone thought the future was going to look like in the 70s, but futuristic design actually looks pretty bad, and they had a way better design vision back then.
Simple, mechanical SFX design effectively complete the lo-fi strangeness of the film. Robert Allsop the SFX technician who joined the team did a sterling job on the fabrication of the bulbous head, beak, tentacle and the beating heart. We echoed the octopus theme throughout - from slippery glass bowls, to weird lamps and a giant wooden/poly carved TV.
For me these types of scripts are perfect, you get to communicate a powerful message in a super fun and creative way.
