In July this year, Aardman asked me to direct a short animation for a competition hosted by the film and education charity Into Film, the IPO and the Industry Trust for IP Awareness. It was a competition for children to design a storyboard to inspire other young people to respect creative content and watch films through legal means. The project was called Creating Movie Magic and it was in partnership with Aardman Animations. There were loads of brilliant entries all with different creative ways to talk about respecting film copyright but we could only choose one winning storyboard and the one that made us laugh and was most 'on point' was 13-year-old Hannah Mason's. So we made it into an animated short film and tried to keep it as close to her original storyboard as possible, with a zombie and a fairy and little details like the main character's giant shoes.

There was a small team of us who made it happen. I designed the characters and directed, Henry St Leger did backgrounds, Jo Hepworth animated in Flash, Spencer Cross composited in After Effects, Louise Johnson produced, Laura Izzard wrote the music and tracklayed the sound effects and it was mixed by Andrew Wilson.