Re- Capturing Childhood
"Re-Capturing Childhood". was the second Possum Party submission for 2025's Cardiff Quick Draw 48 hour animation challenge. This year's theme was childhood.
Made by Charlie Swan Pullin, Sam Helyer, Erin Urdahl, and myself. It was screened alongside 81 other entrants at the Cardiff Animation Weekender at the Chapter Theatre. It would later be shown at Bristol's Bluescreen event at the Cube Cinema.
Since my living room had the most space, we decided to set up our temporary studio there. Animation sleep over! After receiving this year's theme, "Childhood", we got to work coming up with an idea and assigning our roles.
We all drew a whole bunch of character designs. Ultimately, we chose Charlie Swan Pullin's design for the boy, and Sam Helyer's design for the old lady. We all quickly fleshed out the story, Sam put together a proper script. It was unanimously decided that Erin Urdahl, who was working remotely from the US, would be the perfect fit to voice both characters. She had the voices to us in less than 20 minutes, and did such an amazing job. Charlie put together an animatic, and we were off!
So, we had two characters talking on a bench, no backgrounds, not much action. Simple, right? Not exactly. This was a near one and a half minute, lip-synch heavy project, that had to be finished in (now) less than 48 hours. We realised it would take too long to lip-synch the entire thing. We needed some cut away animations to save on time. We came up with the duck and frog interplay idea (which also acted as a nice bit of forshadowing), and I animated all those sections, along with anything that wasn't lip-synch. Erin designed the Possum Party logo, and animated both the titles and bench. Basically, anything with boiling, that was her. She also sourced all the sound effects.
As we completed each shot, I composited everything and edited the film as quickly as I could. It was down to the wire, but we got it in at the very last second.
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I made sure we were stocked with snacks, and reminded everyone to hydrate. Charlie commented on how it's easy to forget you have a body when you're in the throws of animation. Very true.
While it got a bit stressfull at the eleventh hour, we found the whole experience to be so much fun. I'm glad we got to do it in person. Definitely more motivating. I'm so proud of the team and what we accomplished. Can't wait to do this all again next year.