Scott Free - A Beagle's Story
Vintage cel animation for The Aftermath, a Scott Free feature film directed for Ridley Scott, hand-drawn frame by frame in the style of late 1920s Disney.
Working on a feature film is always special, and this one came with a particularly beautiful brief. The Aftermath, starring Keira Knightley and Alexander Skarsgård, is set in post-war Hamburg, where a British colonel and his wife are assigned to the city during reconstruction. Our sequence appears during a touching scene where the family nostalgically bond over an old film shown on a projector.
The animation needed to feel genuinely old -- not retro or pastiche, but authentically of its era. We looked closely at late 1920s Disney, studying the linework, the limited palette, the particular way characters moved before the full Disney style had fully developed. Then we stripped back everything we'd learned in the decades since and tried to make something that could plausibly have come from that time.
Frame by frame, entirely by hand. It's one of those projects that reminds you why this craft matters.
For more on this kind of work, see our TV graphics production page.
Credits
Client: Scott Free
Director: Justin Lowings
Creative Director: James Murphy
Producer: Miles Paulley
Animation: Justin Lowings, Abhishek Kasegaonkar