Anti-Bullying Alliance

The Anti-Bullying Alliance charity gave us full creative freedom for their #There4Every1 campaign called ‘We Need To Talk About Bullying’.

We came up with the idea of bringing schoolkids’ rucksacks to life. In a world of identical uniforms, a rucksack is often the only bit of personality a child can show. So, we turned some of these larger-than-life bag personalities into characters and let them talk about bullying. It was a chance to fill the project with playful verbal and visual bag-related gags, while addressing a serious topic.

We started with the usual- script, character designs and storyboard and then puppeteered the characters using AI.
We would have preferred to create this film using practical puppetry techniques, but constraints meant we’d have had to drop the idea altogether. The trade off was superior puppet performance, but we believed the concept was strong enough to really connect with schoolkids anyway, so we went for it.