Axis Animation, where I work as a producer, wanted a short animation to share with friends, colleges and clients in lieu of a christmas card.
There was an open invitiation to anyone in the studio - from the cleaner to the company director - to submit ideas.
I'd been watching a lot of episodes of the wire recently so inspired by that I came up with the idea of subverting the Father Christmas character and casting him as a drug dealer with a worryingly young client base. Of course, for Christmas you need a happy ending so it turns out that the Santa's not pedalling crack - he's just swapped chimneys for street corners and is still handing out toys (and the occasional bad knitted jumper) to the neighbourhood kids.
I was really pleased when I found out that my script had been chosen but then came the real challenge. We had 2 1/2 weeks from start to finish to get this made and a budget of peanuts. I enlisted Weerawat (character design & compositing) and Mark (animation) from the Animation & Visualisation masters as well as Reza Dolatabadi (backgrounds) and against the odds we completed the animation in time for it to go up on the Axis vimeo channel for Christmas!
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