I cant watch it without cringing, but hey. 

University for the Creative Arts - Blue Light - UCA​

The nice people at UCA asked me to do a little interview for my film Blue Light, and here it is:

Student animation exploring PTSD and the emergency services screens at festivals around the world

date: Friday 22 September 2017

A short animation exploring how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) affects the emergency services, created by one of our Farnham students, has been accepted into film festivals around the world.

Blue Light, by Harriet Croucher, was inspired by the recent-graduate’s father, who was retired from the London Fire Brigade with PTSD. The hand-drawn documentary film is now set to screen at a n...

...there's someone furiously animating. 

I am pretty pleased with this. Obviously it needs a few more in-betweens, but I like the rough and jarring look of the animation, and the intensity of the colours. Nearly there.

I have spent far too much time on this sequence. It's only a few seconds long, but I know if I can get the look and feel right, it will pave the way for other sequences of the film. I tried at first, just using oil pastel, but it wasn't frantic enough, so I have gone back over the frames with watercolour splashed all over the place. 

I have also decided to use a couple of frames which are really photographic. Not many, just a few mixed in with the animation, to see if I can get a really jarring feel, whilst still hinting at a sense of reality. Fingers firmly crossed.

So many call outs for emergency service personnel are for road traffic collisions. I spent some time at a fire station, observing firemen training for such an event. This sequence, I really feel this sequence needs to feel anxious. Over bright colours and jarring animation, I hope will do the job. 

Test animation in oil pastel. I wanted to get a really rough and jarring feel to the animation. 

"I have no back teeth, from where I have ground them all away with the stress."

"I had to give CPR to a man once. I can still remember the way his teeth scraped against mine."

"...it wasn't the body of a child. It was a sausage that had been too long on the BBQ, and had slipped down onto the coals..."

During an interview I conducted with a retired police officer, he recounted the story of a 4 year old girl, who had been taught to light her parent's cigarettes. "The nightgown she was wearing was nylon..."

Rough animation test of some emergency lights. Watercolour and oil pastel.

Poster design in oil pastel

Oil pastel