Behind the scenes · 2009
The making of Warrior’s Dance.
The project we get asked about more than any other. Two first-year students, a stop-motion suite in Stoke and a music video for The Prodigy. Without it, there probably wouldn’t be a Carse & Waterman.
Watch it
The Prodigy: Warrior’s Dance.
Directed by Corin Hardy for Academy Films. Animated elements by two students from Stoke.
The story
Inexperienced. Not short of passion.
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01
The call
Gary and Daniel were in their first year at Staffordshire University when Academy Films got in touch. The job: create all the animated elements for The Prodigy’s new music video, Warrior’s Dance.
About half of what you see in the video is stop-motion animation; the other half is puppetry. We did most of that animation ourselves.
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02
Made in Stoke
Staffordshire University backed us all the way, letting us use its stop-motion suite, cameras and lights.
The director, Corin Hardy, came up to Stoke to work with us, staying at the much-loved North Staffs Hotel opposite Stoke station. Corin went on to direct The Nun for Warner Bros and, most recently, Whistle. We loved his vision then, and we still do.
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03
Blood, sweat and tears
We had never worked on anything on this scale. We were inexperienced in production, but we made up for it in passion and energy, working morning, noon and night to deliver everything we possibly could.
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04
Then it launched
Truth be told, we weren’t that familiar with The Prodigy. It wasn’t until the video launched that the scale of what we’d done sank in.
People from other countries came up to us, having read about “the students who worked on the Prodigy video” in their local papers. And in the student union bar, where the music channels played on loop all day, we’d be sat with our friends when our video came on. The ones who knew would react. We knew something cool had happened.
From the shoot
Behind the scenes.
A few photos from the shoot at Staffordshire University in 2009.
A behind-the-scenes secret
The blob of hair gel.
In one scene, the cigarette-packet men pour vodka from a shot glass and set fire to it. We had no idea how to animate liquid like that, with the character, all in camera at once. In the end, we used hair gel.
It largely worked. But in that shot there’s one single frame with a random blob of gel sitting next to the character. Nobody noticed until we’d already shot the frames that followed, and it wasn’t picked up in post either.
So, 17 years later, our little blob still lives on in a music video from the archives of music history. We’ll always know it’s there.
It was the birth of our company. We owe our careers, to some degree, to this video.
What it led to
A foot in the door.
It was a stratospheric moment, and how we responded to it shaped the first five years of Carse & Waterman. It opened doors we could build on.
The Prodigy: Warrior’s Dance
The start of it all: animation for Academy Films and director Corin Hardy.
Santander, with Lewis Hamilton
The Santander campaign starring Lewis Hamilton, racing on a Scalextric-style track.
Africa United
Animation for the feature film distributed by Pathé.
Every studio has an origin story. This is ours.
Thank you, Corin, Academy Films, The Prodigy and Staffordshire University. Read how the rest of the story unfolded.