Tell us a bit about your organization and what your specialty is in the film and video space.

Beakus is 15, and we make all kinds of animation for a wide range of clients. But we’re perhaps best known for our original TV series for children, having made Olobob Top, Yakka Dee!, and most recently Big Lizard. We can act as a co-producer alongside other companies on large series, where our specialism is pre-production materials like scripting, storyboards, and animatics. We’re often commissioned by NGO’s, brands, broadcasters and charities, on short form digital animated content to raise awareness of their work. Past clients have included Google, Sky, BBC, The Wellcome Trust, The Guardian, Red Bee. On short form work we provide an end-to-end service, delivering stand-out animation to time and on budget.

What is your organization’s ethos and how does it set you apart from industry competitors?

We are a boutique, director-lead studio, where creativity is prized above all else. My role allows me to pick and choose the work we do, and support young directors on their journey, as we don’t retain a roster of talent so can hire from anywhere in the world. I would say we have a sensitivity to the medium and the message that brings out the best in our crew, and delivers the best for our clients. We are always listening, always learning, and always problem-solving. But most of all, we were born to be storytellers, whether making something abstract and playful, or something hard-hitting and game-changing. We see the story in everything, and love nothing more than crafting bespoke visual journeys via the best medium in the world – animation!

How can people join or learn more about what you do?

Please explore our previous work on our website. You can also reach us Instagram and LinkedIn. Reach out, send us a message. We’re a very small team so we can’t get to every message quickly, but we love reading them. If you’d like to collaborate, tell us why. And tell any young person you know to check out Big Lizard on BBC iPlayer!!

Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?

We’ve worked hard to free up enough time to develop our own original TV series, working with amazing people who inspire us. One such guru is Amael Isnard, who we’d worked with on and off for 15 years. He’s an illustrator, animator and director, and he had an idea for a TV show about a man and a lizard living together on a distant planet. Our wheelhouse lies in kids TV, so we worked with Amael to develop his idea into a show for 4-6 year-old children, where a child character hangs out with this quite large lizard, exploring a prehistoric planet and learning nuggets about space, science, and how to get along. We’d already made shows like Olobob Top and Yakka Dee!, so we had cultivated a track record, but it still took about 3 years to get to greenlight with CBeebies and France Televisions. We co-produced the 3D CGI animated show (of 52 x 7-minutes) with a French studio, Je Suis Bien Content, as Amael lives outside Paris. It was a wonderful experience, a beautiful production, and the whole crew are stupidly fond of the characters and the world. It has a faux-claymation look, fantastic voices (Josh Widdicombe), and is now playing out right across the globe (it’s just started on ABC Australia!).

What are you most proud of about this piece? What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you solve it?

A TV series is a complex beast! We’re proud of having developed the show into what it is, taking many months of creative ingenuity from a small bunch of dedicated people. Convincing the BBC and France Televisions to commission the show is no mean feat either, and then raising the rest of the funds requires legwork, perseverance and quite a bit of pain. BUT, it’s all worth it when the show transcends all that pre-production and blossoms into a lovely, fun, adventurous piece of storytelling that we know delights its young audience. Personally, I’m proud of the stories we tell, and especially of the emotional storytelling, where we take a 7-year-old and explore their reactions to their bizarre surroundings and their friendships with such a unique cast of animal characters.

The biggest challenge really happened before the actual creative work began – there were countless times when pockets of money dropped out of the finance plan, and we feared Big Lizard would never be made. Our resilience, and tenacious persistence in finding a way to fund the show, is something I’m very proud of. It provides me with the confidence that anything is possible.

Do you have any advice to other filmmakers based on your career or your team’s approach to work?

There’s no better way to learn that on the job. Practice, practice, practice. And observe. Watch people, how they narrate their own stories, how they hold a room, or don’t. And think of your audience – so much content is focussed on the maker… them showing off their skills, but ending up with visual wallpaper. The simplest visual can be worth it’s weight in gold if it speaks to, connects with, and sends a message to its audience. That’s the holy grail.

Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?

The animation team enjoyed creating vignettes of the show with plasticine – as a way to work out accumulated aggression to do with working on computers all day – and there were some thought-provoking scenes, like Big Lizard being roasted on a spit, or a grizzled Lizard smoking with a beer can in his hand. My favorite is of our Dad character posed like Michelangelo’s David, with a fig leaf to protect his modesty!

Tell us about the most memorable response you got from this work.

We have a young fan of the show who just can’t help but express how much she adores the central character of Cosima – who, to her, is very real – and is begging us for a second season! She loves Cosima’s voice, her look, even her ponytail…

But we’ve also had reviews on TikTok, which brighten our days – one of which read “how are you not famous, please this is sooo good.” Love it!!

Complete this sentence: ‘Great video storytelling is…’

… an alchemy of imagination and technique that adds up to more than those parts.