Kris Hofmann: Wildlife Aid “Saving Harry”

UK director Kris Hofmann and her intrepid stop motion crew spent five months helping Harry the urban hedgehog find his way back to the safety of the forest. Turns out numbers of the wee spiny beasts have plummeted from 30 million to one million in Britain due “to loss of habitat and a variety of man-made dangers.”

Kris Hofmann: “This was a collaborative process between illustrator Sandra Dieckmann, model maker Joe James and myself. I gave Sandra a storyboard and asked her to draw the environment that Harry will be traveling through. I sketched a fairly rough design for Harry, noting that I wanted the paper cut pencil style spikes and passed this on to Joe.

“We then built the different elements of Sandra’s world (walls, trees, bins etc.) from grey card. This allowed us to give the illustrations ‘body’ and merge the worlds of the flat drawings and the model puppet. For example, when Harry is walking through the forest the trees cast shadows on him, etc.

“In a final stage I mapped Sandra’s drawings onto the 3d paper craft elements, the floor and the background. We shot on a Canon C300 with a set of Zeiss lenses. Comp work was done in After Effects.”

Director / Kris Hofmann
Illustrator / Sandra Dieckmann
Model Maker/ Joe James
Puppeteer/ Amber Donovan
Art Department / Nicola Wren
Director of Photography/ Mirko Beutler
Lighting Assistant/ Peter Panoa
Additional Photography/ Filippo Bianchi
Sound Design/ Alexander Zlamal
2d Animation/ Lilian Fu
compositing / Kris Hofmann
additional compositing/ Nuno Costa

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