Project Wild Life, Previous Work: Foundation Film

The first thing when starting this project, was to look back on how it started. This project was started in 2012 for a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, and has since been worked on in spare time during our time at Leeds College of Art studying Digital Film, Games and Animation.

The summarise the project, I designed one character for a short film set in an anthropomorphic wild west, where the story was based on the events of the 'battle at kruger' wildlife video, that can be seen at this address. The events of this video show footage of Lioness' hunting a pack of African Buffalo, and eventually catching a baby one. They take it down to the waterfront to kill it but suddenly a Crocodile jumps out a grabs the baby Buffalo, and a tug-or-war insures between the Crocodile and Lions over the baby Buffalo. The Lions win, dragging the baby Buffalo back up to the main land, to which the herd of Buffalo then come charging back for their baby, who is miraculously still alive. The herd fend off the Lions and take their baby back.

The inspiration we took from this was that at the time of viewing this for the first time we were intending to make a western film and noticed the similarities between the violence, brutality and 'everyman for himself' ethics of the Wild West and Wildlife. This is how the idea was born. We saw a story of how the Lions could be the abductors of the child, the Crocodile could be the bounty hunter send to retrieve the child, and the herd being the town he was taken from, were one Buffalo could be the Sheriff to protect them.  The only issue was all the animals acted like their western counter-parts, apart from the Buffalo, who acted extremely out of character and not usually this brave. So we thought about what animal is more likely to act like that. To go back and protect its family. This is where the idea of a Gorilla came in. Gorilla's live in families and the dominant Silver-back is very protective of them. So by switching the Buffalo to Gorilla's, the characters would seem to act more naturally. So that is what we did. We designed and built a set and characters and made the whole film in miniature. Here is the design for the character I produced and then built, and the film production shots. The film can be veiwed a this link.

Following the sucess of the project, we then created a few more characters for the town. All work is copyrighted under Callum and Stuart Brown 2014.