Friends Electric on Creating CICLOPE Festival Film

It seems ETC's newly-launched Friends Electric division is already in demand. Director/writer Bjorn-Erik Aschim (pictured, left) was commissioned to create the opening film for last week's CICLOPE festival; a beautiful animation about the changing creative landscape due to the constant evolution of technology.

shots caught up with Aschim and Friends Electric EP/partner Alex Webster to find out how he got involved, what the project required of him and what drone technology spells for the future of storytelling.

How did Friends Electric working on the Ciclope opening film for 2016 come about?

Webster: Last year our sister company Electric Theatre Collective won a heap of awards at Ciclope and as such were asked by Francisco who runs the festival, if we would consider making the festival film for 2016 as he’s a great fan of our work and recognised us for having an interesting creative voice. We looked on it as an opportunity to present some original work to a truly international audience of creatives and producers so naturally said yes...

What was the brief they gave you?

Webster: The great thing about this project and working with Ciclope was that the brief was incredibly open. It was about creativity and technology. At the outset we opened up the brief to The Line, a London based directing collective we represent who have a habit of making incredible, high concept and unique animated films. I picked it up and ran with it; I wanted to make a film that would allude to the the 'future of content’...

How did you decide who would take on the project?

Aschim: Part of The Line’s creative process is for each of the directors to go away and think about the brief, then get together to interrogate the ideas each has come up with. We explored several different approaches that were completely different in tone. Most of them didn’t involve animation at all. In the end, we locked ourselves in a room and broke it down to about 2-3 ideas that we thought were do-able and voted on what we liked best. My idea of following a flying Amazon Prime drone through a post apocalyptic landscape, delivering a message to a little girl came out as the winning suggestion; a sort of modern take on the message in a bottle.

Did you know how you wanted to approach it straight away?

Aschim: No...The Line had many ideas initially, each relating to how we absorb and react to content online but none of them really stuck. They were all tonally very different.

How did you get to the point where you knew this was the right approach?

Aschim: A lot of festival openers seem to follow a very prescriptive format. We knew that we wanted to stay away from the flashy high-end motion graphics or flying logos that seem to be the norm for a lot of these intros. It didn’t really interest us and we wanted to break that convention, so following that formula was out of the question. We had always wanted to do a project that had a more economical and graphic approach to 3D animation but which was still highly emotive. We wanted to make a film with a narrative that could move an audience through its use of a simple graphic language and this seemed like the perfect place to try it out for real.

The music is fantastic; can you tell us a bit about that?

Aschim: The track was composed and mixed by Liam Paton at Resonate studios. Originally we were going to go for a poem as our backdrop but we found it difficult to make it work well. It quickly became either too literal or too wishy-washy and pretentious. A musical approach became a more powerful solution. We wanted to use the human voice and wanted some kind of human chant that would echo the music box theme at the end. As if a group of people had heard the music box theme and interpreted it and made it their own. Liam did a beautiful arrangement with his friend Jade who recorded multiple versions of her own voice and together they really took it to another level.

What was the hardest part of the process?

Aschim: We were a very small team and we were kind of teaching ourselves how to use 3D software as we went along. We’re essentially 2D animators although we’re slowly moving in to 3D territory. We had some great help from Friends Electric and artists at ETC, but there was a lot to learn and towards the end we had to re-build certain shots from the ground up when time started running out!