Tate Movie promotional video

We talk to Sarah Cox about Tate Movie,  a collaboration with Aardman and Fallon, and first project of its kind – an animation film made by and for children across the UK – supported by Legacy Trust UK, a charity established to support innovative cultural activities which celebrate the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

What is Tate Movie?

It’s a huge project! The ambition is to get every child in England to contribute to a 20 minute animated film.

It was developed by the advertising agency Fallon, who came up with an idea to get kids to make a movie.

They had written a script and had brought it to Aardman with the idea of creating an animated feature film. This script along with the basic concept was then shown to me. Initially we were struggling to find a relevance to kids across the age range of six to eleven.

So my idea was that instead of a script that adults had written, we would do a series of workshops to create the story from kid’s ideas. We’d have a website as well that kids could contribute elements of the script and all the visual assets and the soundtrack too.

Is that how it’s going to work?

Yes. At the moment we are building the website with Aardman Digital, and this has become a huge and amazing project in its own right, with a real community and a virtual studio with animated HODs – an editor, an Art Director and a ‘blagging it’ director.

It’s a collaboration between Aardman (I’m freelance directing this with them), Fallon, and Tate.

Did Fallon approach Tate?

Yes, Tate are a client of Fallon’s, so Tate came on board eventually. But this has taken three years to get all the finance and partners together.

Those are three very different kinds of organisations.  How do they even understand what each other is saying when they’re in the same room?

We have a base camp, and there are two levels of communication. There’s a producer, organiser, administration and communication going on – and that’s a lot to do within the funds and the tightening of the scheduling.

And then there are creative conversations that go on too. These are between partners but also now with the key crew.

There is also going to be a Tate Movie bus going round the country, to reach ‘hard to get’ kids, because the idea is that any child, if they want to, can come to contribute. They will have an opportunity even if they don’t have a computer.

And what are they being asked to contribute?

Drawings, sound effects. On the bus there is a sound booth, so they might contribute a burp, or a scream or a violin solo.

I imagine there’ll be quite a few burps!

Exactly!  Because we want as many contributors as possible, all that I know that the film will have at the moment is crowd scenes!

On the test we had a lily pond with lily pads and lots of frogs, so loads of kids drew frogs and then we got them all to record a burp, and so each frog did a burp.

So it’ll be something like that. We might go into a garden and there’ll be 5000 bees.  And every child can draw a bee and so on and make a buzzing noise.

Are you prompting them?

Things will come out of workshops. I’m working with the script editor Lucy Murphy, and we’re building a story question tree, so it will be like ‘Who is the Hero?’ is he ‘Human, Animal’, are they ‘Male or Female…Alien’?

We hone things down and we find out at the end of the first batch of workshops what the story is about. Then that gets written… two thirds written… and then we have another session of workshops and fill in the gaps.

There will still be some holes in the script, we’re calling ‘Managed Holes’, and the contributions from the website fill in those.  That might be like, this character says something to this character, so what is it?

It’s a real crowd sourcing kind of thing.

Yes. And there’s a lot of scepticism about whether this could work in a meaningful way, but we’re really committed to it being a clear narrative.

And is it your job to assimilate and filter the sounds and images?

Yes. I’m the invisible director.

So you’ve no idea what it is going to look like?

I kind of know. I did a test with kids’ drawings, so we did a technical test. And we’re building it like staged 3D.

But a really important thing to me was that I think kids aren’t necessarily impressed by their own drawings, but if you take their drawings and put an amazing 3D camera whizzing around them and put them in a really epic scale, they would be impressed. I know that’s what I want to do with the techniques.  I’ve got an idea of the kind of look of it. But I’ve no idea what will happen, except that there will probably be some kind of crowd scene.

There are certain films that we’re imagining it might become like, because it could incorporate lots of different bits of narrative but still would have a spine to it. So we’re thinking Wizard of Oz, Yellow Submarine…

Films can really hang together by pretty slender threads can’t they?

Yes. And we’re going to have a main character that should lead us through the story.

Does that character exist yet?

No! It will come out of the first batch of workshops.

Fingers crossed!  When’s it happening?

It’s happening now. The website is being built now. The workshops start in July and the film production starts in October.

And where and when do we get to see it?

Probably summer 2011.