RTS Midlands Award Nominations 2022

In 2021, The Royal Television Society held their annual RTS Midlands award ceremony online. (Where we watched the celebration of creativity unfold – in our PJ’s). This year, the 2022 Midlands awards will be held in person, the first since 2019. Our Second Home team will be switching into our best dress to celebrate our fantastic 4 nominations across 3 categories.

Animation: The Flood

In 2020 we became a development partner for a project within The New Creatives scheme. A scheme that was supported by the Arts Council England and BBC Arts. It was a real pleasure for us to collaborate with new animation and illustration talent Anya Butler.

Together, we transformed her original poem, ‘The Flood’, into a short animation. This mixed-media piece tells the story of Mr Blair, who ignores a drip coming from his ceiling with disastrous consequences. A simple metaphor about ignoring small problems until they become big ones.

Animation and Craft – Production:
The Girls Who Turned To Water 

The Girls Who Turned To Water highlights the impact that dirty water has on the education of thousands of girls. It is often a girl’s responsibility in a family to walk to collect water, which is often dirty. This results in days away from the classroom. Without clean water they miss out on the knowledge to create change.

We wanted to keep craft at the forefront of the look and feel. So, we designed and built the puppets, sets and props imbued with a chiseled, textured finish. The water, both dirty and clean, was modeled and animated as in-camera replacements. Take a look at our dedicated portfolio page and read our insights on how this film was brought to life.

Craft – Post Production:
BRB Don Quixote Trailer   

This production was made for the highly established classical dance company, Birmingham Royal Ballet. They reached out to us to produce a trailer for their debut tour of Carlos Acosta’s Don Quixote. Our brief was to capture the essence of this Spanish adventure to lure in new audiences across the UK.

This was a challenging project due to limited resources from the new production. These included a model box, a single costume and one rehearsed solo. Post-production was relied upon to bring these elements together and create our stop motion inspired trailer. We filmed principal dancer Céline Gittens on green screen and combined the footage with 3D animation. This created a vintage look and feel using paper cutouts. The piece is accompanied by a recording of Kitri’s solo by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia.

For a full list of categories and their nominees, head to the RTS website. The ceremony will be taking in place in Birmingham on Friday 25th November.