CHALLENGE: Save More Lives. As that's what the Fire Service do!

Working along side the South Wales Fire Service, Shark Biscuit created a short film that would raise awareness for the crime of arson and the dangers of setting fires.

Client:

South Wales Fire Service

Website:

View website

Task:

Cinema Production. Documentary Production. Promotional film.

Through the use of live-action footage, visual effects and motion graphics Shark Biscuit produced ‘Look at me Now’, which tells the story of a gang of teenagers all showing off in front of each other, two boys in competition over the girl's attention start causing trouble in the neighborhood. One sets fire to a bin thinking it’s cool but the consequences are much hotter than any of the teenagers could imagine.
The target audience was to be aimed at teenagers, therefore we decided to create a graphic novel film inspired by Sin City, that would be brought to life as the camera zooms into the different frames within the comic.

The video is part of an Arson Awareness Campaign that is promoted in all the schools around Wales. The video was also seen on ITV Wales online and distributed across all of The South Wales Fire Service social media. The film was launched at Chapter Arts Cinema and it was truly fantastic to see the production on the big screen. Producing the video was incredibly labour intensive. In order achieve the stand out colours Shark Biscuit had to rotoscope each shot frame by frame. She also created a thunderous sky replacement & performed an overall killer grade which really spikes the viewer's interest.

Shark Biscuit are also adept at long-form content, so when the Fire Service gave us the mission to produce a feature film of their 'Exercise Polygon' the first of it's kind in Europe that could also be used as learning tool for the future we were only too pleased to oblige.

The Exercise Polygon is a major incident exercise that's main aim is to raise awareness of the risks surrounding water, especially during periods of flooding, and how to stay safe in and around water.

Several members of Welsh Ambulance Service staff were involved, in particular many members of Hazardous Area Response Team (HART), working in partnership with 15 emergency services and organisations including – South Wales Police, South Wales Fire & Rescue Services (SWFRS), Mid and West Wales Fire & Rescue Services, RSPCA, RNLI, Maritime & Coastguard Agency and Natural Resources Wales.

The volume of various scenarios that they were simulating was not just going to prove difficult for the emergency response team but for our production team too. The event took a considerable amount of pre-production planning paying particular focus on accessibility, safety and camera positioning in order to be able to capture the action in full throughout the duration of the rescue scenario.

The volume of footage that we shot meant that we had plenty of rushes to get our teeth stuck into on the cutting room floor. Our motion graphics department produced Polygon themed graphics that were used to punctuate the top and tail of each rescue scenario.

A bilingual teaser of the film was made to air across social media channels 2 weeks before the full feature.

Our final task when the film had been produced was to author a DVD that could then be given to each emergency service representative that took part. To guide the viewer audibly through the film a female voice over was used.