MA Directing Animation students at the National Film & Television School have been creating our official festival trailers for the past 14 years! During that time, we’ve been treated to hand-drawn, stop-motion, pixilation, claymation, puppet, rotoscoping, 3D, hybrid animation… so many techniques and each style unique.
This year NFTS graduates Meg Earls and Mansi Maheshwari embraced the zany side of LIAF with a wild and wonderfully animated trailer featuring mischievous and fun-loving rats. Here’s what Meg (whose film It All Comes Down screens in our British Showcase this year) and Mansi (whose film Bunnyhood screens in From Absurd to Zany) had to say about the process:
We wanted to make something really fun and weird. We’ve had this joke about rats for a while and whenever the opportunity came up to work on the LIAF trailer we thought animation rats were the perfect fit.
We wanted to capture the experience of how it feels to be introduced to the weird and wonderful animation world. So we came up with the idea of this rat who bites a cable containing all the animation knowledge in the universe. After experiencing the beautiful world of ~ Animation Rat London ~, he momentarily comes back to his senses and thinks, ‘Hey that was pretty great. I think I’ll bite again’.
This got us thinking about the first films that inspired us as baby animators, ones that left an impression and we wanted to pay homage to those. Most notably you can see a reference to Run Wrakes ‘Rabbit’ but there are others you may notice. Including but not limited to: Phil Mulloy (That’s nothin’!) Susan Pitt (Asparagus) Joanna Quinn (Britannia) and Alien Mr Burns from The Simpsons.
This was our first time working together professionally and one of the biggest questions we had was surrounding how we were going to blend our styles together. We thought it would be fun to do a sort of ‘baton’ technique, where you pass the shots from one person to the next. For example there’s a shot where the rats are sitting in traffic, and an Ambulance Horse runs past. Meg animates the cars and background, then sends the shot to Mansi, who animates the Ambulance Horse over the top. In this way the style for the trailer feels quite integrated of both of us not just visually but also our sense of humour.
For the sound and music, we wanted something that would get people going. A trailer is shown before every screening, so you need something that’s going to get you in a good mindset. We were lucky to work with Alex Faingold, who did both the sound and music for the project.
We had a lot of fun drawing endless rats for 3 months, we hope that you have fun watching them!
Meg & Mansi
Special thanks to Meg Earls and Mansi Maheshwari and the National Film & Television School. And here’s the finished trailer…
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