Ian Whittle

Second Home Studios

Second Home Studios produce animation in all its forms, from serious to silly, creating work which has garnered multiple BAFTA and Royal Television Society Awards. Landmark projects include (latest first): 2017 has seen the development of the studios' own Manta motion control system which has been used for several projects for Sony pictures. For children's content, the studio has produced work for CITV's 'Share A Story'​ competition where young audience members pen short stories to be professionally animated. These bodies of work have consistently won three Children's BAFTAs in the short form category, with a Second Home produced film entered each year. Working large scale, civil engineering giant Bechtel commissioned Second Home Studios to design and build a ‘Rube Goldberg' machine to promote their educational STEM outreach. The end result, 'The Engineering Machine'​ won Best Production Craft Skills at the Royal Television Society awards: (http://secondhomestudios.com/portfolio/bechtel-the-engineering-machine/) Story development is central to the studio's ethos. The hand-drawn BAFTA nominated, 'The Mechanical Musical Marvel'​ (co-written with poet Julie Boden) went through thirty-six iterations of the script before being animated in just six weeks: (http://secondhomestudios.com/portfolio/the-mechanical-musical-marvel/) The darkly atmospheric 'Pilsner Urquell - Legends'​ film, animated entirely in paper, remains a signature stop-motion project in the commercial portfolio, cited by Sichuan TV Festival as the ‘perfect combination of technology and art, form and content.' (http://secondhomestudios.com/portfolio/pilsner-urquell-legends/) The 2006/7 short film, 'The Animal Book'​ landed as one of the first short films to use the DSLR workflow which has revolutionised the stop-motion medium. The film, with an environmental message about ‘going to where you belong', has screened at more than seventy film festivals and continues to receive invitations even now.