1984. The United Kingdom. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, embarks on a crusade to modernise the country, to bring back the glory of the Empire. The unions are her enemy, and her victims are the coal miners. After a year long strike, a miner from a sleepy town somewhere in the North travels down to London in order to confront Thatcher.
This film came about as an exploration of an idea I had for a video game, set at the same time, and following the same concept. While developing the video game, I realised that there was an interesting story to tell, and challenged myself to explore this story using the medium of animation.
To the right is a video from the early stage of development of the game. The main mechanic was to be a conversation simulator where the main character would defeat “enemies” by talking his way out of the situation.
I wanted to understand why this story felt important to tell. It takes place long before I was born, but it is in many ways a familiar situation. A sense of hopelessness, despair, an inability to change things, a lack of confidence to take things into our own hands. A political system that pours all of its energy into destabilising the people, and maintaining absolute control. In the midst of all this indecision and inactivity, I wanted to tell the story of someone who decides to take their cause into their own hands. Whether they are successful or not remains to be seen.
Images in Progress
This project was an exercise not just in storytelling, but also in animation and pixel art. As the project progressed I became increasingly confident with my workflow, and I created my own approaches to the problems I was facing. This was very creatively stimulating as I had no conception of a professional workflow and so I was creating my own systems based on what I needed and what I wanted to achieve. This act of problem-solving was challenging but very rewarding.
luca muscia design 