Benjamin Peter, an artist I had worked with before, dropped me a message while I was on an unannounced break from social media. When I finally checked my Instagram many weeks later, I found a lovely message from Ben asking if I’d be interested in animating a story he had about a lonely matchstick finding its way in the world. Thankfully, he was still interested in working with me when I got back in touch, and the track he shared was beautiful and really spoke to me at a time when I was feeling burnt out. I had been debating going back to freelancing again, but this gave me the push I needed.

The majority of the storyline is Ben’s creation. He helpfully provided an initial outline linked to timings within the sound, and from there I expanded on it with a few of my own ideas - like running from the drinks can or the butterfly scene.

My process for this type of animation is fairly consistent - I’ll draw a storyboard and then cut that into an animation. That becomes a tool for feedback and developing ideas. Following that, I focus on getting the layout right - cameras and some animation - which naturally leads into finalising the principal character animation before creating the scenery and ultimately rendering. Here you can see how scenes worked side by side, with some elements changed. I storyboarded the log they walk over as sitting upright, but when I got to animation it was too quick and didn’t allow time in the edit for the level of animation it needed, so I dropped the idea. In the initial intro, I thought we’d probably have a very long tracking shot past traffic onto the matchstick, but when looking at the scale the scenes worked at, the shot needed breaking up a little more, and I feel these closer shots really help introduce Mr Match and allow us to connect with him.

Scale was one of the biggest constraints on the project. Before I even storyboarded, I made a couple of Mr Match mock-ups with matchsticks and Blu Tack, and these sat on my desk throughout the project. Some issues with lenses came up in ways identical to when I’d tested with real lenses. When something is that small, depth of field becomes a real issue, and many of the problems I had in rendering the characters were fixed by heavily stopping down apertures. I did find that in closer shots the flames could bloom out much larger than I wanted, and again aperture was used to control some of this.

The animation was created in Unreal Engine with a mixture of motion capture and hand-animated scenes, with most motion capture needing some level of readjustment to suit the pose or angles I wanted. Having main characters with elongated limbs meant they didn’t move quite like regular humans, with tall heads needing their movement dialled back. For some scenes with highly specific movement, like him trying to light himself (to get warm) this had to hand animated as the movement was so important to get right. For the crowd scenes there's about 5000 match sticks as well as a mixture of other characters like chopsticks, lollipops and even the odd cinamon stick. There's a pritistick and a hockey stick but these didn't make the final version. This level of scale was achieved using a plugin called "Overcrowd" which uses Unreal Engine's niagra particle system to scatter assets across a scenes. It's possible to get that system to do more sofisticated things, but I just wanted happy waving sticks and didn't want to over complicate what was on of the more techical scenes. One of the other challenges was the rain. I used the Easy Rain plugin for the rain, which worked great especially in the opening scenes but could run into issues due to the small scale - with droplet levels sometimes being too spare or heavy until these were dialed for the scale. I'm really happy with how the rain works on the opening shot. To get a high qualtiy sunset I could have reached for HDRIs but used Ultra Dynamic sky as I needed the ablity to control time of day on the lead up to this.

For the graphic matched transition between city and forest I duplicated the same scene - both camera and animation movement - and had a number of placeholders where the lamposts would change into trees. I then slightly reworked the street scene so that the shop sign and the morning sun were in simular places.

Working out angles and animation before creating the scenery is important. It would be entirely possible to build huge amounts of scenery only to have it end up out of frame - and keeping this project on time and on budget was really important for its success.

Ben gave me a huge amount of freedom on this three-month project, and this space allowed me to throw myself wholeheartedly into the animation and its characters. During production, my kids would come and look at some of the shots, and there was far more pressure to get it finished from my four-year-old than from Ben. The project was completed on time and just below budget, with some asset budgeting coming in slightly under what had been set aside, which is ideal. Ben was extremely happy with his film and, as well as launching it to promote his beautiful music, we are also now planning to take it to film festivals and animation screenings. I’m extremely grateful to Ben for asking me to work on what has genuinely been a huge career moment for me, on a song and story that utterly resonate with me, and I hope many other people will feel just the same.