Published 25th March 2025

Behind the Craft: Darcy's Tale

Åsa LucanderDirector

Darcy’s Tale is a short film raising awareness of groundwater flooding. The film follows Darcy, a lonely mole searching for love, who is suddenly swept away by rising groundwater.

In this blog, Director Åsa Lucander explains the creative process behind the film.

AIM

The client came to us with a very open brief, wishing to raise awareness of groundwater flooding. Unfortunately, not many people are aware of its occurrence and devastating impact. The aim was to drive focus and support for the new national network “Let’s Talk Groundwater Flooding,” created by three groundwater flooding projects funded by Defra.

We were lucky to have built a relationship through our previous short film, Missy's Tale, created for Cornwall Council, The Environment Agency, and Defra's #BeFloodReady campaign in 2021. Missy's Tale highlighted the impact flooding can have on homes and families, from the perspective of Missy the cat.

It felt important that we contributed to raising awareness and highlighting the implications climate change has on our society and our lives. Creatively, it was very much a joy from start to finish, as there was room to create a compelling story as well as deliver an important message.

STORY DEVELOPMENT

Sometimes it is easier to tell a story from an animal’s perspective. Animals create great empathy in humans, and this empathy can then be combined with a simplified narrative to provoke genuine feelings from audiences.

The film is about groundwater flooding, so we wanted the film to be about an animal whose habitat it would affect. A mole seemed like a perfect fit. Groundwater flooding is much slower to occur than river flooding. There might be heavy rains in the spring, but it can take up to six months for it to rise into gardens and cause long-lasting devastation. Unfortunately, with climate change, more and more people are going to feel the brunt of it.

With spring comes showers, which can be the start of groundwater flooding. Therefore, I wanted to begin the story in spring and finish in the autumn. Thinking of other events happening in spring and in our gardens, my thoughts were drawn to the celebration of love. Lots of animals are finding partners and building homes and families together. From there, I started to weave a story together—one that people could relate to, even if it was portrayed by animals.

With this in mind, I set out to create something that would grab audiences’ attention with an emotional storyline at its core. So, I decided to tell an emotive story about a mole looking for love.

STORY

We are following a mole’s journey where he and his neighboring friends are being affected by the devastating ramifications of groundwater flooding. It is a story showing how groundwater can be a hidden threat causing flooding when you least expect it. It can take away your home, your stability, and what you hold nearest and dearest to your heart. We wanted to draw attention to the damage groundwater flooding can have on our lives and how we can be prepared by awareness.

PROCESS

The brief was very loose—the client’s wish was only to raise awareness of groundwater flooding, as many are not aware of the differences from normal flooding and how differently and unexpectedly it can affect a neighborhood.

CHALLENGEs

As we had created a previous film on flooding, we wanted Darcy’s Tale to sit closely to the previous short in style and theme. We needed to highlight the disaster but end on an uplifting, hopeful tone, so we chose the route of producing a sweet film that contributed to awareness and encouraged people to hopefully talk about the issues and what needs to be done to support people in need of help. One thing we need is kindness, in bucket loads.

VISUAL LANGUAGE

Once we had the idea and the script for the film, we then moved on to thinking about the visual look for the film. Even if we took some artistic license in terms of how we portrayed the flooding and devastation—it became more of a stylization of what floods look like and how the water rises, etc. However, getting there, we studied a lot of references and talked it through in depth with the team.

I have collaborated with Marc Moynihan for years, and with this project, he has been with us from the beginning, carving out a wonderful visual style for the Flood Protection films. With each film, we tried to push the visual style a little further or add something new to the mix that would make it slightly different from the previous film. With Darcy, we wanted the backgrounds to be even richer, looser in style perhaps, adding in a warm magical tone when we went underground. Marc was also joined by Chloe Bristol, who is a wonderful artist that we were lucky to have on board creating some of the backgrounds. You might not think of putting groundwater flooding and beauty in the same sentence, but that’s precisely what they have done. They managed to take a scene from the underground and create something magical from it. And it is a film about a mole looking for love, so this was something I wanted to be reflected in the visuals as well.

The technique was 2D, backgrounds created in Photoshop and animations in Animate, with textures applied in TV Paint and then comped together in After Effects.

CHARACTERS

I wanted the characters to be simplistically stylized yet give room for personality and charm. I also wanted to experiment with including textures and highlights to give the character more volume and shape. From my initial sketches and designs of Darcy, Alba Filella (Spain) came up with the final character designs that were wonderfully stylized and full of charm and expressions.

I deliberately wanted the characters to be quite simplistically stylized, partly for stylistic reasons but also for it to be faster to animate. However, this meant we needed an extra step in the process (we did the textures and highlights in TV Paint, and the animation was done in Animate), so that slowed the process down, of course. However, I do feel it was necessary to blend the characters better into the scenes and give them a nicer volume and end result.

STORYBOARDING

Once the story and look were in place, I created a thumbnail board that was then passed to the fab storyboard artist Barry Reynolds (Ireland), who drew out the action in more detail. Barry has a great way of drawing everything out in bold, immaculate detail that makes the process for everyone coming after him so much easier. The panels that he drew then got turned into an animatic—which is a moving storyboard where we can start to get a sense of the pace and timings. It’s here we lock down the timings of the shots and don’t deviate much from the action in the film.

MUSIC

At this point, the animatic gets shared with the composer, Matt Loveridge, so he can start to compose the music for the film. We share a brief and discuss in depth what we want out of the music and the emotional tones for various stages of the film. He did a fantastic job in creating the all-important music for this film. It’s a delicate balance between supporting the voice-over and visuals and for it to then carry the story in parts and elevate the emotional beats of the story.

ANIMATION

Alongside this, we start with the animation. I’m very fond of frame-by-frame traditional animation and wanted to keep the feel of that in this film as much as possible. It’s a balancing act where we are racing against a tight schedule.

We had five amazing animators working on the film: Henrique Barone (Canada), Mara Farella (Italy), Salvador Padilla (Mexico), and Olly Montague (UK), and I think they did a fantastic job. A truly international team. Once the animation was done, it got passed to Monique Malan (South Africa) and Clea Tselentis (South Africa), who applied textures in TV Paint. We then combined character animation with the backgrounds and added finishing touches and effects in comp, which was done by Bram Ttwheam, Spencer Cross, and Bijun Zhuge. The film was edited by Dan Williams and sound effects by Andrew Weigh and William Davies.

PRODUCTION TIME

Quite often, these kinds of projects have quite a quick turnaround because of budgets and schedules. I’m incredibly proud of the whole team who worked so hard to get the film over the finishing line and within the time we had. That is also hugely thanks to our wonderful producer Hannah Richmond and production assistant Beth Loates-Taylor, who made sure we were all on schedule while juggling client expectations and budget restrictions vs. my creative goals. With Hannah’s calm, open, and friendly nature to her approach to work, she made sure everyone felt appreciated and ensured we got the best out of the time we had.

Originally from Finland, Åsa moved to London in 2001 and joined Aardman in Bristol in 2014, where she is now based. She was first drawn to illustration and from there her passions developed towards moving images.

View Åsa's full bio