Happy New Year!

Here at Chicken Fruit, we have a tradition of writing up a recap of the previous year every January. In these recaps, we also have a tradition of saying something like “Ooh we feel like we were really busy, but it doesn’t look like that much when it’s all written down!”

Anyway, we had a good year in 2023! It felt really busy! But now we’re about to write it down, it doesn’t seem like that much? Haha so weird. We’ll do our best to recap the last 12 months anyway.

Perhaps most people in our industry are a bit more mature than we are. Perhaps we, too, will one day reach the lofty heights of jaded ambivalence. But for us, even though we’ve both been doing this kind of thing for over a decade, it’s still lowkey a bit exciting when we have to sign an NDA. We’re being trusted with important confidential information! We have to guard it against competitors! We’re basically secret agents.

But here’s the thing about signing a Very Important document saying that you won’t talk about something: you can’t really talk about it, even in yearly wrap-up posts. Surely there should be some kind of “okay but you can brag about it a little bit on your blog” clause? Because our main focus throughout the year was a project that we’ve vaguely alluded to before. We’ve been working on it for over 18 months now, and throughout that time it has twisted in so many new directions that it’s now basically an entirely different thing than it was this time last year. We’ve been on such a journey with it! We’ve been designing! Animating! Making things! But can we say anything else about it? NOPE.

Although this Secret Project was our main focus for the year, we did manage to squeeze in a few more things that we CAN talk about! Thank goodness.

Greenpeace: Stop Deep Sea Mining

In February 2023, we were fortunate enough to be able to work with Greenpeace again on their campaign to prevent the mining of the deep sea. As we discussed a little bit in the behind-the-scenes blog post, this one had a fairly intense turnaround, which was actually quite a nice change of pace from our long-term Secret Project.

We had great fun pushing ourselves with this job. If there was a downside, it was only that our timeline for it ran right up to the weekend of Cardiff Quick Draw, our favourite 48-hour animation challenge. We totally intended to do both and extend the animation madness for another few days, but by the time the Friday night arrived, we felt like we had been mined ourselves; our creative sea floor was well and truly empty. We’re a bit disappointed that we missed the collective chaos of Quick Draw for the first time since March 2020, but rather than be out of our depth, floundering around like fish out of water, we thought we’d let ourselves off the hook. 🐟

Happy 5th birthday, Meteorlight!

Speaking of films, in late 2023 we celebrated Meteorlight’s fifth birthday! Actually (humblebrag incoming; apologies), we celebrated two of them: the anniversary of when it first premiered at the BFI Southbank, and of when it first aired on BBC Four.

But, as anyone familiar with the hexagonal language created for the Meteorlight universe knows, it’s actually six that’s the most important number in that world. We’re hoping to have something Meteorlighty in store for 2024 to celebrate…

Loneliness & Laundry

SpEaKiNG of FiLMs, our other longterm project of 2023 was the short film we’ve been talking about for years. It’s been in and out of production since 2020, and in that period it has had many titles. It started off as Get in the Washing, which was more of a silly way we referred to it in-house that stuck. For a while we trialled Delicate Fabrics (and Other Items), and then just Delicate Fabrics. Because we never really settled on a title that felt right, we kept referring to it as “our film about loneliness and laundry”. This year we realised that, actually, that’s the real title after all.

One of our goals for 2023 was to entirely finish the film. And you know what? We’re not far off! This time last year, our production spreadsheet said we were at 35% complete. Since then, we’ve added several new columns and we’re approaching 80%, which is tantalisingly close to the finish line.

We’ll be honest: it wasn’t just January 2023 when we vowed we were going to finish this film within 12 months. Actually, the last three (three! tres! 三!!) New Year’s blog posts have had “release the laundry film!” as one of our goals, so obviously this process is taking longer than we thought it would. We’re getting to the point where it feels like many things in our lives are on hold “until the film is done” and, reader, the film is never done.

BUT this year we’ve made more progress than we ever have before, and that feels good. It’s starting to look more like how it does in our imagination! And more importantly, we are still enjoying the process of making it! Even though the film’s entire message is “you don’t have to do things all by yourself”, we are accidentally making it pretty much all by ourselves. This might have some influence on the timeframe of production, but it does mean we’ve been able to experiment with almost every aspect of film-making so we can figure out exactly what we’d like to keep doing ourselves in future, and what boring bits we can pay someone else to do for us.

Here are some things from Loneliness & Laundry we’ve developed this year:

Tabitha

It took us a long time to figure out the design of Tabitha, our film’s main character. Eventually – in a move that many might describe as lazy and many more might describe as grossly self-indulgent – we made her look like what would happen if Jonny and Lindsey had a child: round face (Jonny), chonky thighs (Lindsey), big dark sluggy eyebrows (both of us).

The film has two different art styles, so we needed two different versions of Tabsy. In the first half of the film, she contrasts her painted environment by having flat colours and being contained within a sketched outline. As the film progresses, she sheds her outline and becomes more unified with the rest of the world.

We spent a lot of time testing out methods of making Tabitha’s sketchy outlines of emotional repression. And there probably is a way of generating them in 3D software! But we did not find it. No matter how many methods we tried (Redshift shaders, Sketch and Toon, EbSynth, Grease Pencil), we couldn’t quite replicate that imperfect hand-drawn feeling we wanted. So even though we promised ourselves we would not hand-draw every frame… that’s exactly what we’ve done. (The good news is over the Christmas break, we finished the last shot that needed sketchy outlines!! It’s done!! It only took six months!!)

Doing it manually took a long time, but it did also allow us to get creative; whenever Tabitha is experiencing particular distress, her outlines get more chaotic, with timing charts, notes and other scribbles visible on screen.

Tabitha’s other art style is a painted 3D texture, which we also did by hand (lol), but thankfully we have not have to fully hand-paint every single frame. We made some painted textures that we apply to Tabitha’s 3D model so on the first render, she looks a bit like this:

Then we divide that shot into keyframes, paint over those again to roughen up her sharp edges, and then use EbSynth to interpolate the other frames in the shot so everything comes out painty nice. Then we go back into Procreate and add any smear frames that we need. The final result shows a bit more life and movement than the 3D version does, but hopefully still carries that tactile painted feeling.

Not-Tabitha

We’ve also spent a good chunk of time figuring out our backgrounds. Simple solutions seem to bounce right off this production, so to make our painted backgrounds we’re working with a combination of:

• flat digital paintings

• 2.5D painted elements

• projection mapping onto 3D objects

• 2D paint strokes.

The “final background paint” is one of the only columns in our production spreadsheet that is still 100% red (the other is final comp) so as yet there’s no shot we can share here to prove that all this is worth it! But here’s one that’s been through the Rough and Mid stages:

To contrast with the sad blues and purples of Tabitha’s flat, we wanted the second half of our film to (a) have lots of beautiful pinks and yellows and (b) to take place inside a giant washing machine, with soft cushiony clothes lining the walls.

Here’s the problem with that: if you are not careful, what you intended to be a beautiful fantasy washing machine drum can look an awful lot like an anal passage.

Soooo we had to spend some serious time redesigning the backgrounds in the second half of the film to make them look more like the inside of a magical washing machine and less like a rectum that culminates in a holy glowing anus.

And that’s where we’re up to! At this point, we’ve signed off mooost of the animation, so soon we’ll get to do some exciting stuff like work with musicians and sound people, cut together a trailer, and procrastinate on actually finishing the film by making a fancy promotional poster that will have no use other than it’ll make us feel cool! This is it!! It’s happening!!! 2024 baybeeeee!!! 🥳🎊😍👯🎉

2024

Usually at this point we come up with a few goals to work on for the year ahead. This time, we tried to tie in our New Year render with this theme, with every number representing a goal (finish the film! travel! do more small projects! take time off!). Here are some initial sketches:

But in developing this, we got excited by just making something fun and childish. We’ve spent so long working on the same two projects, you guys. It was nice to take a week to be a bit silly.

Jonny had fun animating simple shapes and making textures and playing with bright colours for a project that had no expectations and no real deadline. Lindsey locked herself in the studio with some tubs of Play-doh and some cheap kids’ slime and recorded sound effects. The soundtrack came from Jonny handing Lindsey a recorder out of nowhere and telling her to play Auld Lang Syne off the top of her head.

In a way, it did end up being a nice representation of how we want 2024 to go, after all: full of projects that are fun to do and make us laugh. What else could we hope for?

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