Working alongside Oscar nominated director Siqi Song, Second Home crafted the stop motion short ‘Dewmini’. The film was one of six animated shorts in the She Creates Change campaign for educational charity Room to Read. Produced by Nexus Studios and creatively led by Emmy-winner Martha Adam.
Style: Stop Motion
Client: Room To Read, Nexus Studios
Year: 2024
The Project
Room to Read is taking the next step to scale Girls Education Programs. She Creates Change is a multi-media storytelling initiative – spanning an award-winning animated and live-action film, illustrated books and compelling audio stories – that boldly aims to reach all 432 million adolescent girls (ages 12-18) in the world with content and educational curriculum.
Exploring subjects like financial literacy, discrimination, climate justice, menstruation, and harassment, She Creates Change amplifies the true stories of relatable young women to show girls that they too can create positive change in their own lives and communities. ‘Dewmini’ is a stop motion animated short with an inspiring tale of a girl who helped her family survive during drought.
The Creative
Director Siqi Song’s speciality is storytelling through the art of stop motion, the perfect medium for bringing a handmade feel to all elements. For Dewmini, the look of the film was to feel fantastical, warm, and textured. All sets and characters were based on photographs of Dewmini, her family and her home. It was important to stay true to the real references when it came to creating the puppets and environment.
Crafting
Characters were built using ball and socket armatures and silicon shells, all hand carved to have subtle skin textures. Heads and hair were sculpted with a polymer clay then silicon moulded & cast using fast-cast resin. Each were then individually painted. Costumes were fabricated to replicate similar existing items from the family, paying particular attention to Dewmini’s school uniform.
The sets included a full house exterior, kitchen interior, Dewmini’s bedroom and the signature garden in various stages: drought, as a fully flourished dream garden and the inbetween state where Dewmini’s ingenuity comes to the fore. Dewminiʼs garden provides food and brings hope to the people who are suffering severe drought. Therefore once grown, the garden was to be bright, colourful, alive, and appetising – full of greenery. Siqi wanted to incorporate paper into the garden, using simplified but stylised shapes throughout to reflect the books and sketches which Dewmini used to imagine the solution to her family’s problem.
Continuing the paper theme, we built a version of Dewmini growing as a plant, using paper leaves and flowers. The flowers blossomed into aubergines which are then picked by her mother as the family reap the rewards of their work.
Production
All stop motion sequences were filmed in house at Second Home, with a heavy emphasis on the use of our in-house motion control system.
On signature ‘moco’ sequence came in the form of Dewmini’s dream sequence. This is a big moment in the film that brings Dewmini’s dreams of a full garden momentarily to life. For this sequence we animated Dewmini crawling through her dark bedroom window into a rainbow fantasy. Several passes were shot using different lighting states, which were then composited together for a seamless finish.
A technically challenging moment of the film was Dewmini breaking out from a seed pod and climbing through the soil. The seed pod was crafted using plastic former for shape, covered in corn husks for texture, and then back lit for an organic womb-like feel. The earth surrounding the seed comprised of foam covered in gritty materials and pumice. The foam was rigged either side with two threaded bar which enabled us to move the ground incrementally to pull apart.
Post Production
Rigs were used extensively throughout the film which then needed to be removed during post production. Following clean up, the mouths were added, which were 2D animated and lip-synced to the actors’ voice performances.
To composite the mouths, the heads of the puppets had to be tracked in 3D. Each puppet head was captured in 360º photogrammetry, giving us a perfect digital version of the puppet heads. We then lined these up with the animated footage, tracked the head animation frame-by-frame and then applied the 2D mouths onto these 3D heads.
Cleaned and composited shots were handed over to Nexus to finalise the audio mix, grade, titles and credits, completing the film.
Awards
Winner: Manchester Animation Festival, Short Films for Children, 2023
Client Testimonial
SHS are a fantastically talented and lovely bunch of people. Their creativity and enthusiastic support was invaluable; bringing to life the wonderful story of Dewmini for ‘She Creates Change’, as Directed by Siqi Song. Thank you for all of your efforts. – Rebecca Archer, Producer, Nexus Studios