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When you start a video production company, there are a few milestones that you look forward to as you keep thrashing your nose at the grindstone, writing concepts and pressing the record button. One milestone that’s always been on 3angrymen’s mind is producing a video that gets a million hits on YouTube and we finally reached that point on 30th March 2012 with our You Can Talk To Us film for ChildLine, so we thought we’d write up a little bit of background on the project.

The film was made in July 2011 and was in response to one of the most exciting briefs we’ve been given, all about engaging that oh-so-hard-to-please crowd, the British teenager. Specifically, ChildLine wanted to make a video that would remind older teenagers that the service was for them as well, not just younger “kids”.

We knew the concept had to be fresh, entertaining and hard-hitting, something to make older teenagers sit up and take notice and that didn’t avoid the more difficult issues that were specific to that age group. In short it had to look and feel like nothing else we’d produced for ChildLine to date.

The main challenge we had to contend with was to include a number of differing, often intangible issues that effect a wide cross-section of our core-audience – peer-pressure, pregnancy and sex – just to name a few. Eventually we hit upon the idea of moving through a landscape, travelling past teenagers as they experience these various problems. Everyone has experienced walking past a stranger engrossed in an argument and wondered what it was all about, imagining what’s really going on; we took this concept one step further and developed the idea of bringing their inner thoughts to life through animation.

We immediately began researching the graphic style with long-term collaborators and After Effects/animation wizards – Visitor. Initially the idea was to use material from the teenagers costume to create the graphics but some of the early concept sketches made everything look a bit too ghoulish so off we trotted, back to the drawing board.

At an early stage the decision was made that we’d see this landscape at night and Visitor soon hit upon a new theme that could run throughout the animation – neon signs. Using neon to represent the thoughts and emotions of the teenagers worked well, simultaneously shedding light on these dark scenes in more ways that one.

Our next challenge was to find the young people that would star in the video. Some of the smaller parts were filled with relative ease but the main character, that would lead us from start to finish in the film, was proving tricky. One of the last to audition was Michael Lewis – an actor we had filmed in a production for the Almeida Theatre a few months before. Michael had just the right look for the role – a blend of street-wise resilience and teenage vulnerability, we signed him up sharpish.

Location-wise we had decided to go with as non-specific a city landscape as possible and in the end we shot in a few different places in Lambeth, London. The DOP Andy Walker filmed every shot using an Arri Alexa and a Ring-Flash mounted on a Steadicam. This equipment was incredibly heavy but Andy walked around with boundless energy until six in the morning, two nights in a row. When we wrapped I was forced to wear the kit for a few minutes – I couldn’t feel my legs or hips it hurt so much!

Once we had the footage in the bag the real work began. The time constraints we had were very tight, to come up with 15 relatively complicated SFX shots in under three weeks. Illustrating these issues so that they were universally recognisable without being too obvious was the main hindrance, some animations hit their mark straight away while others took lots of amends to get right. We got there in the end but there were definitely some fraught evenings and some very late finishes along the way.

One thing that we knew would be pivotal to the final video’s success would be the music, not just to help the edit along but to let the audience know, straight away, that this wasn’t going to be another happy-go-lucky film aimed at children. After a good deal of scouring spotify for something appropriate, we turned to our friends who work in the music industry and we were pointed in the direction of a dub-step DJ pairing called Matta. Matta were very enthusiastic about creating something for our audience, bought into the idea behind the film and set about creating a track that would really make an uncompromising, instant impact on the viewer. Once the video was online, the music was a major talking point for the audience, who began clamouring to hear more and since then Matta have released the song as a free download.

After a final audio dubbing session the film was handed over to the NSPCC in both 1 minute and 30 second formats. The whole process had taken just 26 working days from the folk at ChildLine agreeing to the concept to posting the video online.

At the time of writing the video has 1,141,365 hits and counting. Here’s hoping that a few of those viewers will think of ChildLine next time they’re in trouble and need to talk to someone.

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