Happy Place: An Unwanted Toy Truck Goes On A Fanciful Adventure In This Adorable Short Film
On Black Friday when you're fighting with other shoppers to get the discounted goods, spare a moment's thought for those lonely toys left on the shelf, stuck in their plastic packaging and longing to escape. OK, we all know that isn't strictly true, but use your imagination for God's sake
That's what filmmakers Sharp & Jenkins (Tom Jenkins and Simon Sharp) did in this whimsical, no-those-aren't-tears-it's-somethinhg-in-my-eye short film that imagines what happens to the unsold toys left after Black Friday's madness has come and devoured nearly everything in sight.
It seems the toys, specifically an RC truck in this instance, have some kind of reverie about being free, adventuring down the dirt roads they're tantalised with on their packaging, and meeting other toys having similar fanciful daydreams. Eventually meeting up for a convoy, before coming crashing back to reality.
It's very sweet, very Toy Story-esque in it's toys come to life narrative, but also involved a bunch of interesting filming techniques.
Sharp and Jenkins explain:
Pretty much the whole film was shot in-camera, and we developed a bunch of innovative techniques allowing us to achieve this including a new way of shooting ‘forced perspective’ scenes for when our toy sees other giant toys in the desert.
To achieve this we simply placed real toys right next to our camera (sometimes touching the lens) but to prevent them being out of focus we used a pinhole photography technique that gave us an infinite depth-of-field. We made tiny round metal discs with a pinhole punched through the centre then stuck these behind our camera lens. Normally this wouldn’t allow anywhere near enough light into the camera, but by using the new Sony A7s DSLR we could use its incredible sensitivity to capture what light came through the pinhole – and this technique allows little things placed on the camera lens to look huge! Basically we brought the idea of pinhole photography bang up to date.
You can check out some behind-the-scenes photos below.
