ABOUT

< Content warning - indirect discussion of knife crime, no graphic content >

CONCEPT
Knife Crime ruins lives. Joint Enterprise means people can be prosecuted for serious crime, even if they did not take part directly. Together, these factors are a huge risk for young people, as well as those around them.

The concept for this film was to create a high-impact, relatable animation to help turn young people away from carrying, using or associating with knives. The content was all born from the lived experiences of a group of young leaders

The message and the medium needed to be authentic, arresting and honest to connect with the audience - young people most at risk of becoming involved with knife crime, and those around them that might remain silent until it's too late.


EXECUTION
The heart of the project came from workshops - members of the Hertfordshire Youth Commission took part in writing and concept generation exercises and shared their lived experiences around Knife Crime.

Quinton Green (AKA Mr Milisé) combined elements from the written word pieces they created to form the poem spoken in the piece - an emotive, human, and relatable first-person account of the (fictional) events and consequences that cascaded from one single event with a blade.

I took the script and the Youth Commissioners' concepts for visuals and dove into research, lookdev, and storyboarding. The look was high-contrast and gritty - monochrome with flashes of blue and red, and different treatments for our lead and other characters.

Our lead character had to be someone the viewer could connect with. In Character Creator 5 I built him out, deliberately giving him slightly heightened proportions to help him stand out from the rest.

I used motion capture to bring the character to life - acting out the beats in a Rokoko motion capture suit with face capture, allowing me to get exactly the performance moments we needed.

Cinema4D and Redshift were used to bring everything together in animation, making use of You and Me Academy's YMA Painterly and Toon Studio shaders with HelloLuxxx's Redshift Essential Toon Materials to build a crunchy, halftoned look for the characters and a painterly, inky world for them to live in.

The poem was voiced by four members of the Youth Commission. We rotate through their reads as the poem progresses, then their voices combine to a chorus at the end, reinforcing that a single act can affect many people.

Final mix, comp and grade were done in Adobe After Effects and Premiere, making use of Maxon Studio.


RESULTS
The result was a powerful, poetic and straight-talking film. There was deliberately no happy ending, and the end coda quietly shows the family member left behind - the falling petals in the repeated 'and I was thinking...' revealed to represent their relationship decaying through absence.

I am super-proud to have been part of creating a film that reflects the real experiences of the young people who contributed, so that others might walk away in future.

The film has been used in schools and workshops around the country as part of a push to educate and inform about Knife Crime and Joint Enterprise, with positive feedback from viewers about the impact, emotion and relatability.


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CREDITS

Animated and Directed by:
Mike Choo

Co-written by:
The Hertfordshire Youth Commission &
Quinton “Mr Milise” Green

Voiced by:
Hertfordshire Youth Commission Members

Commissioned by:
Hertfordshire PCC
Leaders Unlocked