I worked with One Were Farmers to create a series of 3 x 3 minute animations for BBC Bitesize – Scottish Texts – ‘The Cheviot The Stag and The Black Black Oil’.

Once I’d recieved the scripts from the Once Were Farmers team, I decided to create the animations in a kind of victorian theatre/ puppet show style as that emphasised how the play was originally performed on stage. The original stage performance was also done by just a few actors, swapping out clothes and changing their voices to be the many characters of the play. So we did the same thing in the animation, creating just a handful of characters, but redressing them to make a huge collection of characters to tell the story.

It meant that the animation could also focus on performance, giving the characters lots of personality and life as they leapt in and out of stage to speak their lines.

The sets also needed to portray the idea that they were painted scenes, moving and shifting in and out of stage as necessary, with the addition of atmospheric lighting to capture the gloominess of a prison cell or the light shining down through the clouds on a farming scene.