GALLERY

Show off your work

01

Ian Wharton & Edward Shires, "Farm"

IAN WHARTON & EDWARD SHIRES
LOCATION Preston / Derby
JOB Graduates
CONTACT www.solarthefilm.com
SOFTWARE Softimage XSI, After Effects, Final Cut Studio

Solar is a short animated film by recent creative graduates Ian Wharton and Edward Shires. It’s a tale of the sun, moon and two characters who inhabit a world that relies on night and day perhaps more than it would seem.

“We have both just graduated from Cumbria Institute of the Arts after completing a BA in Multimedia Design and Digital Animation. We are a newly formed creative team who love storytelling and anything moving-image. Our primary aspirations are to work at a top animation or production house with the eventual aim of running our own studio.”

Solar won the Best-of-Show award at Cumbria’s graduate exhibition. The pair are influenced by books like Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant, which they read before writing the script for Solar. “We don’t think stories are told with the same exuberance these days, so we returned to the good oldies we read when we were kids,” they say.

“The greatest challenge was conceptualising all the mechanics and creating a logical and valid system for the sun and moon’s cycle. We must have gone through 20 re-writes of the script and endless designs for machinery before we settled. Although the story is ultimately fantasy, the mechanics of it still had to seem possible in real-world applications. Establishing a harmonising mixture of weights and magnitudes was difficult but important so the viewers could engage with the world the characters inhabit.”

FARM Home for the Giant and the Operator, the farm represents the simplicity and scale for the world within Solar. Reference was taken from old American barns so there was a human and familiar element to it.