Robot and Scarecrow presents an unlikely romance. A lonely scarecrow meets a robot pop star at a festival and the pair fall in love over music, fireworks and a ride on the dodgems.

The film was directed by Kibwe Tavares (repped by Nexus Studios), who has made ads for Guinness and UEFA and runs animation studio Factory Fifteen. It is Tavares’s third short. In 2012, he created Robots of Brixton, about a robot workforce battling against police in South London. He also collaborated with actor and writer Daniel Kaluuya on Jonah, a charming CG and live action film about a pair of boys who discover a giant fish in a small town.

Robot and Scarecrow started out as a commission for digital arts platform The Space. The platform’s then-Director Ruth Mackenzie approached Tavares with the idea for creating a series of short films at UK festivals.

Tavares had been toying with the idea of creating a story about two characters who fall in love in strange circumstances and wrote a treatment for a romantic short.

He was also inspired by Katy Perry: Part of Me, a documentary film about the US pop singer. The film combines concert scenes with backstage footage and shows Perry having to perform on stage night after night while her marriage to Russell Brand was breaking down.

“I guess it’s the same for anyone [who has to go about their normal life during a difficult time], but most people’s work doesn’t involve thousand of people looking at them,” explains Tavares. “She does this thing where she’s crying and then she just switches to performing mode and I thought there was something in that, that idea of playing a character … so that’s why I thought of having a robot pop star.”

Tavares wrote and shot the film in just eight weeks. Filming took place at Secret Garden Party, an annual festival in Cambridgeshire.

Shooting required some careful planning: “We had a checklist of stuff we had to get through, and some things were determined by what band was playing at the time,” says Tavares. A scene which shows the robot preparing to perform on stage had to be filmed at various points over four different days to fit around Secret Garden Party’s performance schedule.

The Space provided enough funding to cover character design, filming and a rough edit, but Tavares had to find the same amount to cover post-production and VFX. It took around 18 months to find a partner, with video platform Vero eventually offering to fund it. After that, Tavares worked with Nexus Studios, South African VFX studio Chocolate Tribe and the team at Factory Fifteen to animate the film.

Each of its 140 shots features a CG robot, a CG scarecrow or both. Animators built on actors Jack O’Connell and Holliday Grainger’s movements and facial expressions to create compelling CG characters that feel very human – despite the fact they are made from twigs and metal. A scene in which the robot performs on stage was filmed using motion capture at Andy Serkis’s Imaginarium Studios in London.

Tavares’s shorts combine relatable stories with an impressive level of craft. In Robot and Scarecrow, he presents a brief but profound relationship, and the poignant tale speaks about grief, loss and the impermanence of human relationships as much as the heady experience of falling in love.

“I like making human-based [films] – things about connections,” he adds

View all the winning work from The Annual 2018 here. 

Robot and Scarecrow. Entrant: Nexus Studios. Film Production: DMC Film / Nexus Studios / Factory 15. Director: Kibwe Tavares. Producer: Dan Emmerson. Executive Producers: Michael Fassbender, Conor McCaughan, Julia Parfitt, Kibwe Tavares, Chris O’Reilly, Charlotte Bavasso. Cinematography: Luke Jacobs. Production Design: Laura Ellis-Crick. Editor: Jinx Godfrey. VFX: Chocolate Tribe.