There’s no way of beginning a 2020 wrap-up post without sounding trite and cringey and probably insensitive. 2020 was miserable. A lot of people died. A lot more people were in public-facing jobs that are much more stressful than ours is. Like everyone else who works in media, we like to tell ourselves that our role is to provide stress-free fun for people who don’t have the work-from-home privileges that we do, even if said stress-free fun is just an instagram loop of a fox or a too-detailed breakdown of a short film we made.
With this tinfoil hat firmly in place (because if we take it off for too long we have existential crises), here’s what we got up to in 2020.
WINTER
We kicked off 2020 with our work on CBBC’s The Snow Spider. It was a great way to get the year started – we got to play around with Procreate on the iPad we’d bought ourselves for Business Christmas, it was our first TV credit as a studio, and we got to work with a great team (and a dog) in director Jennifer Sheridan and the gang at Leopard Pictures. Not long after, we worked with Jen again on the title of her BIFA-nominated horror film Rose: A Love Story, AND she was really nice about us in a podcast (17 minutes in 😉). Strong start, 2020, we thought. It could only improve from here.
February also saw us start work on an online video project for Greenpeace. At the time, we thought this project would be a solid six months of work for us. Given *gestures vaguely at the entire world*, it didn’t quite work out like that, but this blog post would have had a lot less content if it had done, so. Swings and roundabouts.
We’re hoping to work with Greenpeace again soon, so if green-and-brown paper cut-outs are the animation content you’ve been crying out for more of, you’re in luck! Stay tuned!
We also had some fun in-person events(!!) scattered through the first few months of the year. Through Animated Women UK, producer Lindsey attended an event with Professor Sue Black OBE in a deserted British Museum, which was very cool. As a studio, we attended a clean-up of our local reservoir with the Friends of the Welsh Harp, and we also attended the British Animation Awards at the beginning of March, which was the very last event we did in real life in 2020. It was during that cute elbow-bumping phase of 2020. Remember elbow bumps? A more innocent time.
Thankfully, the BAAs had so many amazing and talented people that we were too intimidated to get even within elbow-bumping distance to most of them. But we were inspired to cram our calendar full of events for Cardiff Animation Festival, which at the time was three weeks away. In three weeks this new virus thing would be totally under control, we thought. A full four days in crowded cinemas with hundreds of other people was a totally feasible and exciting thing that was absolutely going to happen.
Spring
The cancellation of Cardiff Animation Festival meant that the director of the festival, the brilliant Lauren Orme got to be one of the first people in the industry to experiment with taking events online. Lucky!! It was only March 20th when Chicken Fruit took part in the first one – CAF’s Quick Draw Challenge.
Making a film in 48 hours may have been a somewhat stressful experience, but it reminded us that making animated short films doesn’t have to be the painful, drawn-out years of suffering that had been our only experience thus far. So, fuelled by the fact that we made a film in a weekend guys did we mention, we blew the dust off some of our old film pitch documents and decided to just start making them.
Introducing a short film we want to finish at some point: Eternity Shores, an environmental horror story set on a package holiday island!
We’d wanted to make this film for a while, and we figured an itty bitty month-or-two pandemic was a great time to do a bit more work on it – either so we could get a really strong pitch together to beg people for funding, or just so we were in a better place to make it in our free time. So, in this spirit, we got in touch with singer/songwriter/composer Annabel Grace Steele to write a pop song for us to use as a theme throughout the film.
This was wildly successful in one sense – we literally haven’t stopped singing it to ourselves since April 2020. However, as the months rolled on, it became clear that a horror film about cursed holidays and the environmental apocalypse wasn’t what the world needed in 2020. We still love this film and will absolutely come back to it when most people’s emotion-meter isn’t stuck somewhere between Anxiety and Dread.
Luckily, we have another short film that we want to make. Our personal project title for it is Get In The Washing, which is not what the final title is going to be, but we’ve referred to it as such for long enough that it will be very hard to switch. Last year, we asked the phenomenal illustrator/director Izzy Burton to create two pieces of concept art for it, which we’ve since been sitting on like a dragon hoarding its treasure. But we’re committing to making the film this year, so in the spirit of 2021 being the Year Of Getting In The Washing, here’s one of the two amazing pieces of art that Izzy made for us:
We’re SO excited to continue working on this film – which we intend to be, like, a Studio Ghibli-esque exploration of loneliness as a young adult, and also an ode to laundry. We’re hoping to dabble in actually sharing our process of filmmaking this time (instead of keeping it completely secret until we release it and being surprised when nobody cares), so keep an eye on our social media/blog for more updates!
Spring also saw us make a very exciting birth announcement video for our friends Sam and Alice, which was a ridiculous honour that we’re still very much not over. We also started work on ongoing projects with Money For Them and War Magnets, and were invited to do a talk for Animation students at the London College of Communication as part of an industry events session. This was a wonderful experience, not only because it meant we got to chat to students about their animation journeys and share our own – but also because Chicken Fruit was sandwiched between ILM and Animade, both of which are incredibly well-established studios. It was ridiculous and made us feel very important.
Spring also saw us get our first viral tweet, which is an important milestone for anyone with a social media account. It was completely accidental, but gratifying – we spent far too much of our free time working on this little rice cooker animation. 60k Twitter likes makes it all worth it.
SUMMER
Our accidental popular tweet made us realise that we should probably actually start using our social media accounts seriously at some point. Tbh we’re still sort of digging our heels in on that, but we have been using any spare studio time to make more content Just For Fun – a.k.a., Just For Instagram – and it has been a good little playground to test out new styles and methods.
Summer also saw us work on a project for Inform People and some spec work for what3words with Hewitt & Walker. The lovely folk at Friends of the Welsh Harp (from our littler-picking adventures) got in touch again. We helped them out with some logos, and also a poster about what you should and shouldn’t feed ducks.
By this point in the year, everyone else had got on Cardiff Animation Festival’s level of online organisation, so we took part in a lot more online events. In our best pyjama-bottoms/respectable-shirt combos, we attended the British Council Animation Salon through Animation Alliance UK; Animated Women UK’s AGM, CAF’s Diversity in Animation panel, CAF’s Drink & Draw night, CAF’s animators’ brunch, ftrack’s Animation After a Pandemic discussion, and Manchester Animation Festival’s Making of The Tiger Who Came to Tea.
The end of summer brought one last online event: another Quick Draw film challenge, for which we made Look After Yourself, one of our favourite bits of work from 2020.
AUTUMN
In autumn, we started work on more projects for Money For Them (some of which will continue this year – good news if you’re passionate about life insurance). We also spent more time working on the animatic for our next short film (the one that won’t be called Get In The Washing); we had a few story sessions with some friends (if we call them our “story trust” this sounds more impressive) and have tightened and restructured the animatic to make it smoother and snappier.
The little bit of pre-Christmas down-time also allowed us to plan out what we wanted 2021 to be like. The entire structure of the world seems to change every few months these days, so we’re not holding ourselves to any of these, but here are some things we want to do in 2021:
🎬 Release another short film (one we didn’t make in 48 hours)
We’re really going to focus on our laundry-inspired fantasy film this year. We’re bored of our own excuses for not having finished it yet!
🎨 Make our studio a nicer place to work
We’re so, so lucky in that we have a dedicated space at home to work from. However, it is a half-decorated room that isn’t super friendly, and also, importantly, doesn’t look very cool on Zoom calls. This year we want to change it into a fun, creative space that will make us the talk of the breakout rooms.
🤝 Collaborate
We’ve had fun making things for social media this year, but our favourite things have been ones we’ve collaborated with others on – like having Cato score our Halloween pumpkin or making Izzy’s dog-walker in 3D. We’re going to keep our eyes peeled for more opportunities to work with other people this year – so if you have an idea you want to talk about turning into a quick Instagram-appropriate animation, get in touch!
All in all, our 2020 was nowhere near as bad as it could have been, but of course we hope that 2021 is better – for us, and for the rest of the world. We can only convince ourselves that our job is important for so long, after all. (And while we’re still enjoying the delusion, can we interest you in one last instagram loop??)
Thank you for reading this self-indulgent summary. We’re sending our love. Stay safe, wear a mask, make art and look after yourself.
All the best,
Jonny and Lindsey
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