BBC One: The Supporting Act

Hot on the heels of a great, animated ITV promo, BBC One has launched its Christmas 2017 short film, The Supporting Act, that will run throughout the Christmas period on the channel. The animated short illustrates the joy of a shared moment and follows a 10-year-old girl out to give the most important dance performance of her life.

Her dad is a constant presence but he’s busy, and getting even busier as Christmas approaches, and remains distracted up until the moment that really matters, when father and daughter come together in a wonderful moment of ‘oneness’.

The spot was created by BBC Creative, the BBC’s in-house creative agency, working with director Elliot Dear at Blinkink. The film has also broken new ground in the animation techniques it has used with the characters animated using the traditional British stop-motion technique but the facial expressions were created and mapped on the puppets using CGI. This approach gave the film the human touch and imperfections of stop-motion but the emotional richness of CGI.