For the art direction of the film we wanted something that would combine a charm and handmade quality with a sense of cinematic scale and atmosphere. What we landed on was the idea of replicating a model world inside the computer, complete with all the imperfections of stop motion animation. We had been keen for some time to combine our design skills with Electric Theatre’s uncanny ability to make computer generated things look real, and this project provided the perfect opportunity for us to combine our specialist skills.
While we were pursuing a realistic approach, it was important to us that there was a strong, underlying sense of design throughout. Bjorn-Erik Aschim led the environment design for the project. He developed an aesthetic that caricatured reality with a kind of crooked, off-kilter cartooniness. This aesthetic had to be rolled out, and kept consistent in every detail of the film, from the smallest prop to the largest exterior location.
We were sure that we wanted the environments to have a distinct sense of place. The location of the film had to be set somewhere that felt like a typical mid-size British town. We went to work in earnest assembling all the reference we could find. Luckily for us we were designing a world that looked very similar to the world on our doorstep, we started noticing the world around us with greater detail than before. Journeys to and from work became research trips, as we snapped images of victorian terraces, post boxes, lamp posts, cars, busses, and trees.