Nexus Studios' Johnny Kelly directs “A Future Begins,” resumes stop motion saga
By A SHOOT Staff Report
A decade after his double Cannes Grand Prix-winning stop-motion short, Back to the Start, changed the global conversation around animal welfare, director Johnny Kelly of Nexus Studios, London and L.A., returns with a continuation of the farming family epic with the focus this time on human welfare. Teaming up with the ad agency Observatory and the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation, A Future Begins is told through exceptionally crafted stop-motion and set to a soundtrack by Grammy-award winning singer, Kacey Musgraves.
A Future Begins, which earned the #1 entry on SHOOT’s final quarterly Top Ten VFX & Animation Chart of 2021, is a love letter to the patchwork quilt of family-run farms that make up Chipotle’s supply chain, navigating a four-season structure with meticulous craft and storytelling at its center.
Viewers follow our now aging papa from the original film struggling with the farm as his son studies in the city. The tale of hope concludes with the son returning to the now “for sale” farm, reviving it with sustainability and technology on his side reaffirming Chipotle Cultivate Foundation’s ongoing pledge to support the next generation of farmers.
The production consisted of 10 different sets, featuring 82 tiny resin puppets including 12 sheep, 10 cows, 12 pigs, 10 chickens, 12 farm helpers, 10 characters on campus and 16 audience members all captured in one fluid camera move.
Director Kelly’s commitment to authenticity ensured only real world farming techniques used by Chipotle suppliers were depicted. These include solar panels to provide shade for animals, plots of land dedicated to rewilding, and polytunnels to cover Chipotle’s traffic light crop of peppers.
Sculpt Double in London also had a hand in the making of the film as its ensemble included puppet makers Joshua Flynn and Nathan Flynn, and puppet modelmakers Laura Torarides and Rachel Brown.
Kelly shared, “It’s a rare opportunity to be handed the keys to a two-minute stop motion epic, so I was delighted to be able to get the band back together for a sequel. I still love the simplicity of Back to the Start but 10 years on the world is a more complicated place (to put it mildly) and it would have felt reductive to remake the last film. In order to work in 2021 this needed further complexity and scale. More nuanced performance. More geographic authenticity. And more dog. At their heart however, the two stories complement each other; the last one was about animal welfare and the thrust of this story is human welfare.”
With the impact of Back to the Start still felt following its Superbowl debut and results including 300 million earned media impressions and over 80 industry awards, A Future Begins also launches with a bang. This time–in a first of its kind TV premiere–launching in its own commercial pod, the short was broadcast to an estimated audience of 77 million households during the Thanksgiving Day game between the NFL’s Raiders and Cowboys. The film was released digitally from November 16 as the centerpiece of a fully-integrated, content-centric campaign including the release of Musgraves’ “Fix You” on Spotify, Apple Music and other DSP’s, and QR codes on millions of Chipotle’s recyclable bags through which consumers can watch the full film.
To see the full quarterly Top Ten Chart, click here.
Review: Director Morgan Neville’s “Piece by Piece”
A movie documentary that uses only Lego pieces might seem an unconventional choice. When that documentary is about renowned musician-producer Pharrell Williams, it's actually sort of on-brand.
"Piece by Piece" is a bright, clever song-filled biopic that pretends it's a behind-the-scenes documentary using small plastic bricks, angles and curves to celebrate an artist known for his quirky soul. It is deep and surreal and often adorable. Is it high concept or low? Like Williams, it's a bit of both.
Director Morgan Neville — who has gotten more and more experimental exploring other celebrity lives like Fred Rogers in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?,""Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain" and "Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in Two Pieces" — this time uses real interviews but masks them under little Lego figurines with animated faces. Call this one a documentary in a million pieces.
The filmmakers try to explain their device — "What if nothing is real? What if life is like a Lego set?" Williams says at the beginning — but it's very tenuous. Just submit and enjoy the ride of a poor kid from Virginia Beach, Virginia, who rose to dominate music and become a creative director at Louis Vuitton.
Williams, by his own admission, is a little detached, a little odd. Music triggers colors in his brain — he has synesthesia, beautifully portrayed here — and it's his forward-looking musical brain that will make him a star, first as part of the producing team The Neptunes and then as an in-demand solo producer and songwriter.
There are highs and lows and then highs again. A verse Williams wrote for "Rump Shaker" by Wreckx-N-Effect when he was making a living selling beats would lead to superstars demanding to work with him and partner... Read More