Dodging the Perils of Production in Punchy APA Show Animation

"Producers are the people who make everything happen, unfortunately for less and less,” says Who Wot Why co-founder and Dark Energy director Sean Thompson. “In fact they should be called reducers, what with all of the low budgets and the over delivery they have to deal with these days.” It’s this sentiment that stoked the engines of the opening film for the 2018 APA Show that Sean wrote and directed. “It was a pleasure to make a film to celebrate the people who put the money on the screen,” he adds.

The annual showcase of the Advertising Producers Association’s best of British advertising was held last week at The Guildhall in London. This year the APA especially commissioned Sean to make an introductory film for the show, in collaboration with the animation boutique Cookie Studio and Dark Energy.

The film charts a producer’s journey through the year. She has to overcome dark periods of Brexit, trade wars, in-house production, procurement and the various production nightmares that the APA and its members have battled in recent years, before she lands at the the APA Show. It’s summed up with the words: ‘Goodbye Darkness. Hello Light.’

Sean goes on: “The APA had already devised the theme for the night, 'From darkness to light’ and it felt like a great brief that I could get my teeth into.” 

APA Chief Executive, Steve Davies adds: “Yes, the theme of the Show was light out of darkness (i.e. how everyone who gets good work out - or great work - whether agency creatives or directors or producers or editors of sound designers, does so despite, rather than because of, the system by which it is created. With obstacles in their way, it is something of a miracle that good work emerges at all. We wanted the introductory film to reflect that in a fun and engaging way.” 

Thiago Maia (Founder and Creative Director of Cookie Studio) adds: “It was a great pleasure to work with Sean. We love a challenge and coming up with creative solutions to them. We knew it would be hard to design and animate the whole film and also maintain Cookie Studio’s quality in the time we had, but the team worked hard and delivered something that everyone is proud of.”

Taking on any year in advertising was always going to be tough but this year in particular was laden with obstacles. Sean notes: “The greatest challenge was to get it all in. The film could have been 20 minutes long. There has been so much darkness this year, what with an incidence of production fraud where the FBI were called in, and all of the usual grumbles of no budgets and procurement.

“I wanted to broaden the subject out. I knew that a lot of production companies were suffering from loss of European work. Then there's Trump. It seemed that the political climate with Brexit and trade wars were strong areas, and they were highly provocative.” 

The director and ECD further comments: “I found images of early Soviet montage and the works of Man Ray, and J Heartfield. These artists lived in darker times than ours, and they used the collage technique to make powerful and rebellious images.

“Cookie Studios were brilliant. With no time at all, Thiago Maia's animation brought the images to life, and his studio delivered the film in record time. They are a great studio, and I enjoyed the collaboration.”

The film was created by Who Wot Why and produced by Dark Energy with design and animation from Cookie Studio and a hard hitting soundtrack from Eclectic. Having collaborated previously, Cookie Studios will now be represented by Dark Energy for commercial work.