Production

TREATMENT

When I was presented with the challenge of producing a short animation with the title Propaganda I happened to be reading about some of the ways the energy industry was encouraging us to stay warm this winter in the face of a huge hike in energy prices and at the same time these companies were posting unprecedented increases in their annual profits. It struck me that we the public were being gaslit into believing that the solution to the energy crisis was our responsibility. One of the largest companies SSE Energy Services on their company blog advised us to do star jumps, eat porridge, cuddle a pet and go to bed early as cheap ways of saving energy. They said their aim was to help their customer but not once did they suggest they charge less for their gas and electricity and thereby make it more affordable for the public but less profit for the. I was not only struck by how ludicrous this propaganda campaign was but also how it was deeply cynical.

Taking this contemporary situation as my inspiration I decided to make the the genre of my animation a darkly comic satire highlighting both the preposterous messaging the customers of the energy industry is asked to swallow but also how chilling and heartless the underlying intent is. We open the film with a Big Baby speaking on a platform. Why a Big Baby? This is an archetypical image of the propagandist with which we have been familiar from the rallies of Hitler in the 1930s to the more recent speeches of Boris Johnson in the Brexit campaign or Trump in his feverish rallies in the Deep South – all three of these real life propagandist/liars have very distinctive babyish qualities. And so its seemed appropriate that are our propagandist is an actual baby. We see him at the opening of the film, persuading his trusting audience of innocent Little Bean creatures to stay warm by eating porridge and going to bed early. They all swallow this advice and depart for home. We see them obediently hop into bed. So far so good. The action then takes a dark turn when Big Baby appears at the window of the bedroom and quietly enters the bedroom of the sleeping customers. The animation then becomes a comic horror film. Shockingly Big Baby starts to eat the Little Bean people. Not satisfied with only fooling his customers he now wants to consume them. What I am trying to communicate here is the unbridled desire of these multinational giant companies to consume everything around them in the name of uncontrollable profits. In the end they will destroy us and we will be asleep when it happens unless we are alive to the propaganda. I debated long and hard about the final shot where Big Baby, having eaten some Little Bean folk, casually shits them out, upon which they come back to life and, seemingly blissfully unaware of the horror off what has just happened to them, are bouncing up and down and ready to repeat the horror. I was worried that the audience might interpret this as a happy ending whereas the intention is to underline how easy it is for the ordinary person to be tricked by the dark arts of the propagandist. This is the power of Big Lies told often by people who appear to be in authority.