How Blip Made His Journey Home with CHEP, Assembly and Sonar Music
Sick children are often faced with issues far more grown up than they are. It’s only natural that the people around them aim to shoulder the weight of these issues as much as possible.
However, in some cases, shoulding the weight of the issue is more difficult than others. For many children who are battling serious illnesses, the hospital becomes their primary living space.
They spend more time there than at school with friends or at home with their families. Although children’s wards in hospitals often succeed at providing children with a joyful experience, a hospital is not a home.
Hospitals United for Sick Kids, CHEP, Assembly and Sonar Music all came together and created a four minute short film titled ‘Lightyears from Home’. The short film showcases the concept of how going home to be with friends and family can feel lightyears away for children in hospitals.
The film encourages audiences to donate to Hospitals United for Sick Kids, while being creative and inspirational.
LBB’s Casey Martin spoke with Paul Meates from CHEP, Matt von Trott from Assembly, and Matteo Zingales, Andy Stewart, Josh Pearson, and Haylee Poppi from Sonar Music on the ups and downs of creating Blip and his journey.
LBB> Why was this short film important to you?
Paul> Beyond the opportunity to help kids in hospital in a meaningful way, “Lightyears from Home” was an opportunity to tell a great story. Often in advertising we are charged with a list of messages to deliver, with little time left for storytelling. Here, we had one job to do - convey the emotion of what it feels like to be a kid in hospital – and give the viewer time to feel it.
LBB> What inspirations did you use when storyboarding the film?
Paul> The movie ‘E.T.’ was mentioned in character development. We talked about creating a character (who we ultimately called Blip) with enough human traits to make it relatable, but enough otherworldly traits to make it feel foreign. We also talked a bit about how we felt when we first saw images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope – that feeling of realisation that there are parts of the universe we’ve never seen. That there’s still so much more to discover. It led to us starting on Blip waking up in a part of the universe we’ve never seen. Once we’d made that decision, we became unrestricted. Our colour palette widened, our nebula became inhabited by ghosts, and the craters grew eyes.
LBB> What was the key message you wanted to get across to the audience?
Paul> When speaking to kids in hospital, a recurring theme was how far they felt from home, and how much they miss their friends, their pets, their mum’s cooking, etc. We wanted people to not only understand that, but to feel it, and to drive them into action through emotion.
LBB> So far, what has the response been like?
Paul> The response has been incredible. Kids are falling in love with the character, grown adults are crying during the film, and several corporations have reached out after the launch to join the cause.
LBB> Is there a future where we see more of Blip?
Paul> Very much so. Blip has opened up so many fundraising opportunities for Hospitals United for Sick Kids; from merchandising to social donation stickers. And we will certainly see more and more of Blip when we shop, with a portion of every purchase Blip endorses helping kids in hospital get home to the things they miss. We are currently working with a handful of corporate partners like Coles, Lowes, Arnott’s, and Swisse. And we continue to expand, seeking new companies to partner with who are passionate about making a difference in children’s lives.
LBB> What were some of the highlights in creating the story, ‘Lightyears from home?’
Matt> Hospitals United for Sick Kids is a charity that represents an alliance of children's hospitals. Their objective is to help kids get home from hospital sooner, as well as make their stay in hospital more comfortable.
Having the opportunity to work with our friends at CHEP Network Australia to create this film for such a great charity was a real privilege.
We were excited about not having to work to a defined length. Obviously, when it comes to animation this can be a slightly terrifying proposition, but it meant we could let shots breathe a little more compared to having to squeeze them into a traditional commercial duration. We felt like this extra time to take in each shot was important to land the emotional beats of the film and not feel rushed through all the scenarios and the narrative of the story.
LBB> What challenges did you have to overcome?
Matt> Capturing the emotion to land the gut punch at the end was key. Making the viewer feel for Blip, through the character design and performance was the biggest challenge. We wanted to make Blip vulnerable - like a child, in a hoodie a few sizes too large - so the audience becomes invested in the highs and lows and wants Blip to win. Because we were working with a small team, the early stages of refining the script to hit the key story beats - but also create a manageable time limit for the film.
We did go through a pretty thorough storyboarding and animation process to get to our final length. Finding that magic ‘production time / length of film / quality of craft’ equation to produce a film that everyone is happy with in essence - nothing new really but there was an extra amount of pressure coming up with a distinctive character that would become an icon for the ongoing campaign.
LBB> Where did you draw inspiration from for the narrative and visual world?
Matt> The narrative leans into the idea of being far from home and having to deal with the trials and tribulations of getting back there. The idea was to present this as a set of metaphorical scenarios. In each scene, we tried to capture the idea of the various emotions a child might feel - like being lost in a fog with strange figures hovering above or being stuck in a jelly meteor storm.
Visually, we wanted to come up with a soft, textural and welcoming feel to the visuals - making everything feel more tactile and less hard surface ‘3D’. We opted for an illustrative mix of 2D and 3D to create a more graphic storybook feel.
LBB> What was in the inspiration behind the score for Lightyears from home?
Matteo> We were so thrilled to have the opportunity to craft sound and music for this beautiful film. From the earliest stages of the project we knew the score needed to be filmic and dynamic, with a palette that felt exciting, contemporary and unexpected. We extensively experimented with a lot of different ideas from musical textures, instruments, melodies, tempos and sounds as we really wanted to create something that sounded new and unique to the short animation genre. Ultimately, we were inspired by music that felt expansive, otherworldly, and used really eclectic sounds and recordings in a cinematic way to create a strong emotional connection to Blip.
LBB> It has a unique sound – tell us some of the instrumentation that you used to achieve it?
Haylee> Our sound and music teams worked really closely together to create a harmonious soundtrack that enhances the emotional storytelling. It’s the playful interplay of music and sound design that made this film feel exciting and unique, not just the score.
Andy> We loved the idea of really blurring the boundary between where music stops and sound begins. All of the sound effects were added in a way that's sympathetic to the score, often pitched to be in the same key for the dreamlike moments of harmony, or deliberately discordant for unease and tension, depending on the mood we are trying to convey. The sound design throughout is built using custom effects made through synthesisers as well as processed real-world sounds to build an engaging soundscape that is unique from the usual sounds of the genre. We didn't want anything to sound like stock effects, so everything added was considered carefully in terms of what it sounds like and why, with sounds from unexpected sources being applied to familiar situations. For example, Blip's footsteps being digitised impacts processed through a vocoder or using the sound of a colony of small bugs for the unmistakably organic sound of the planet/creature's eyes opening after Blip lands for a rest. This was a great opportunity to have some fun with sound whilst getting to help shape Blip's world and the narrative!
Josh> The score is rich and dynamic, broadly it is made up of many orchestral layers, treated vocals, guitars, synthesisers and organic textures and pitched found recordings. The use of human voice and vocal textures in an otherwise electronic palette is what creates our strong human connection to Blip and injects warmth and familiarity into their otherwise strange and often lonely worlds.
Matteo> The melodic motif bookends the score and reoccurs familiarly throughout the piece as 'Blip’s Theme' and mirrors Blip’s changing emotions by being played in different keys, different instruments, pitched vocals etc throughout as Blip goes from feeling hope to sadness to curiosity to joy. The motif creates connection and a through-line that helps us navigate and understand the journey.
LBB> Finally, what were some of the challenges you overcame during composition?
Andy> One of the most challenging aspects was finding the right voice for Blip. Trying to bring life to a character that only says one word throughout the film, while striking the right emotional tone so that we are endeared to Blip and emotionally invested in their journey, without being distracted was a very delicate balance. Getting it wrong could really detract from the gravitas of the story.
The initial, instinctive approach was to make vocalisations ourselves in sync with Blip’s mouth movements and expressions and pitch them up to make Blip sound smaller, and vulnerable. We experimented extensively, we learned that we needed something unexpected and ambiguous, a voice that felt much authentic to the world that Blip is in.
We found that in saying a word that wasn’t what you would expect in line with the captions brought a sense of being otherworldly but recognizable, ambiguous but familiar. Simple, vulnerable and relatable. The end result came from a random snippet of a random word, spoken in-between recording takes that just seemed to have the right vulnerability and charm once processed, that you certainly would not hear if you heard the unprocessed recording. It was somewhat serendipitous and was hard to ever recreate as successfully!
