By Mark Garcia-Prats
A short film dramatizing the “power of reading” has won two Film Craft Lions awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. The two-minute film, commissioned by the New Zealand Book Council, uses stop motion animation from beautifully crafted cut-outs and pop-ups made from the pages of Maurice Gee’s classic New Zealand novel Going West, to depict scenes from the story, as a narrator reads from the novel.
The short film, also titled Going West, was created by ad agency Colenso BBDO with Andersen M Studios in London. It has received a huge amount of attention on YouTube with more than 810,000 views.
Noel Murphy, who heads the New Zealand Book Council, says, “The idea that lies at the centre of this project is that reading is an activity that surprises, delights, challenges and ignites the imagination.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_jyXJTlrH0