work

It was a Dark and Silly Night is a five-minute short film produced and directed by Flux. The film is a 2D animation of a story, written by Neil Gaiman, who is acclaimed as one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and illustrated by renowned cartoonist and illustrator Gahan Wilson.

The film tells the amusing story of a children's party that takes place in a cemetery with some unusual ghoulish guests.

Flux founder Brent Chambers idolized Gahan Wilson since his youth, when he would buy National Lampoon magazine for Wilson's cartoon strip Nuts. The Flux team animated the film in a way that was as sympathetic as possible to Wilson's story intentions and techniques.

The original story was written by Neil Gaiman after watching his son playing in a cemetery. Gaiman's works include The Graveyard Book - which won The John Newbery Medal in the US for the most outstanding contribution to children's literature - Coraline, Neverwhere, Stardust, Good Omens (co-authored with Terry Pratchett), the script for the Robert Zemeckis film Beowulf and Gaiman's series of comics, Sandman.

Flux created the work using traditional 2D hand-drawn animation techniques which were required for the short film by the projects' overall director and producer. Producer Lesley Chilcott and Director Steven-Charles Jaffe are both highly prominent figures in the US film industry, and it was through a long-standing relationship with Lesley Chilcott that Flux was selected to produce and direct It was a Dark and Silly Night.

Chilcott was the producer of Al Gore's global success, An Inconvenient Truth, for which Flux directed the animated sequences.
 

director: laban dickinson
client: flux animation
agency: flux animation