An Industry Case Study
Narrative | Dramatic Features
Film Name: ONLY A CHILD
Genre: Animation, Documentary
Length of film: 6 minutes and 47 seconds
Date: October 2020
Director: Simone Giampaolo
Producer: Gabriella de Gara
Executive Producer: Gabriella de Gara
Writer: Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Simone Giampaolo
Cinematographer: Simone Giampaolo
Editor: Darren Millstone
Composer: Flavio Gargano
Production Company: AMKA Films
Budget: $150k
Financing: Swiss TV, Swiss Federal Office of Culture
Shooting Format: NA
Screening Format: 2.39:1 (2048×858)
World Premiere: NA
Awards:
- Audience Award at Stuttgart Animation Festival 2021
- Audience Award at SIGGRAPH 2021
- Best Mixed-Media at Los Angeles Animation Festival 2020
- Swiss Film Prize Nominee
- Best Youth Film at Festival Regard
- Best in Show at Florida Animation Festival 2021
- Best Animation at International Tour Film Festival 2021
Website: https://www.amka.ch/film/only-a-child/
The Official Trailer for ONLY A CHILD
Watch The Trailer for ONLY A CHILD directed by Simone Giampaolo
A Short Biography of Simone Giampaolo
Simone Giampaolo is a multi-award winning London-based Director with an insatiable appetite for storytelling, humor and pasta. Currently directing Netflix’s show ‘Bad Dinosaurs’. London, England simone-giampaolo.com Joined June 2011.
The Simone Giampaolo Interview
indieactivity: What is your film about?
Simone Giampaolo (SG): ONLY A CHILD (6 minutes in length, produced in Switzerland by AMKA Films Productions. It is an ambitious environmental animadoc based. This is based on the original speech given by young Canadian activist Severn-Cullis Suzuki. She was at the United Nations Summit in 1992, she is today considered the predecessor of Greta Thunberg).
Tell us about the festival run, marketing and sales?
Simone Giampaolo (SG): ONLY A CHILD had its premiere at Encounters Film Festival in the UK. At the end of 2020, and it’s been on its (quite successful) festival run since. So far, the film has been presented at over 70 international film festivals worldwide. It received several important awards and recognitions. This year it was also nominated for the prestigious Swiss Film Prize, the ‘Swiss Academy Awards’.
Director Simone Giampaolo created the film’s social media channels himself during pre-production. This helped to showcase behind-the-scenes and making-of to the followers. It also introduced the large team of artists to the audience. He’s been managing the film’s social media since, coordinating important posts and news with AMKA Films. ONLY A CHILD’s success attracted the attention of Premium Film. A sales agent specialized in short films, which is now handling the film’s sales and distribution.
Give the full Official Synopsis for your film?
Simone Giampaolo (SG): Only a Child is a collective visual poem created by many animation directors under the artistic supervision of Simone Giampaolo, which gives shape and colour to the original words spoken by Severn Cullis-Suzuki at the UN Summit in Rio in 1992, a child’s desperate call to action for the future of our planet. An omnibus film celebrating the environmental youth movement 30 years in the making.
This film was created (with Severn’s permission and blessing) as a collaboration between 25 different animation directors, each of which used her/his own style and technique to bring a section of Severn’s speech to life: we used sand animation, paint on glass, stop-motion, 2D and CGI, just to mention a few. All the involved artists crafted their bits working remotely from their home studio, while Simone ran the entire production online from London.
Development & Financing?
Simone Giampaolo (SG): Being based on a speech given in 1992, ONLY A CHILD’s development followed an atypical path. First, Simone personally contacted Severn Cullis-Suzuki to get her permission and blessing to use her powerful speech and adapt it into an animated short. Severn sounded enthusiastic and moved about the proposal, and immediately agreed to collaborate. Secondly, Simone approached Swiss production company Amka Films (based in Lugano) and pitched the idea to their producers, who also sounded very interested.
Following this, the funding process started: the team applied for several different fund schemes in Switzerland, such as the Federal Office of Culture, Swiss TV (which ended up co-producing the short), Cantone Ticino, Zurich Film Foundation, Loterie Romande and so on. Luckily, almost all the investors seemed to love the idea, and in less than 6 months the team managed to accumulate enough budget to start production!
Production?
Simone Giampaolo (SG): Production planning was very challenging for Only a Child, because we had 20 different animated segments made by different people in different places while using different techniques. This meant that every segment was allocated its own bespoke budget, schedule and pipeline, which is very unusual for an animated production (rather than having one master schedule and budget, we had 20 sub-schedules and sub-budgets)!
The line producer (Ursula Ulmi), producer (Gabriella de Gara) and director Simone had to carefully plan every animated segment researching the timings and needs of each relative technique, while keeping a bit of contingency budget aside for unexpected calamities.
In terms of timings, the production team had to make it possible for director Simone Giampaolo to follow and supervise each individual section (and relative team) without being overwhelmed: he would have never been able to pay attention to 20 different parts simultaneously (while also working as commercial director full-time at Jellyfish Pictures in London)! For this reason, the production was diluted from the end of 2019 to mid-2020 in order to allow Simone to focus on not more than 3 or 4 sections at the same time. Overall, production lasted around 9 months, and post-production a couple of months.
Festival Preparation & Strategy?
Simone Giampaolo (SG): Amka Films and director Simone already started planning the festival run during production in 2019. However, their plans got disrupted as the pandemic struck at the beginning of 2020. They ended up sending the film only to a handful of prestigious festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, etc), but without much success.
Only a Child’s festival run effectively began at the end of 2020 with Encounters Film Festival (in Bristol, UK), and has been gradually growing since. The film started to receive lots of attention after receiving the Audience Award at the Stuttgart Animation Festival 2021, and the past few months have been particularly exciting for the film (which has now been screened at over 70 international film festivals, while also winning several awards).
The Release?
SG: Well, the film hasn’t really been released yet as it’s still in its festival run, which will probably last until next year (being Oscar-qualified, Only a Child will need to follow certain ‘procedures’ as long as it is in the Academy Awards run, as you well know). In 2022, there will be the 30th anniversary of Severn’s speech and we’d love to publicly release the short on that meaningful occasion, collaborating with Severn herself and the David Suzuki Foundation to help spread the word. It would be awesome!
Advice from the Filmmaker?
SG: Before even coming up with the idea for Only a Child, Simone’s dream was to create a compelling (and ambitious) short using and combining many different animation techniques. He didn’t know how or why, he just knew he wanted to create a collective piece of animated work which would bring different styles and people together (an hymn to the beauty of animation, in a way).
When he heard Severn’s words, he knew that was the right chance to make the dream come true, and he went for it. The moral here is: always keep your dream projects and ideas in your back pocket, ready to use, because you never know when the chance will present itself. If you’re ready, you’ll be able to walk through unexplored doors as soon as they start opening in front of you.
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