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: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More