It's happened is a story and film influenced by global warming and it's effect on our planet. I'm extremely passionate about this topic and wanted to make awareness of it but take it to the extreme.
We don't tend to realise or understand the repercussions of our actions until it starts to effect us directly. In 2013, my home town Hastings saw a 'mini-twister' on the sea front. This was a spectacle for everyone in sight as it was completely surreal to see a natural phenomena like that so close to home. The size of the twister wasn't concerning and it was out at sea so there wasn't a danger. Reports stated that if it had got to land it would have only taken roof tiles and tree branches with it: not acting as a real threat.
This got me thinking. If the twister had been far bigger and far closer to land, what would have happened? With the rapid rise of global warming, I wanted to take this idea and develop a narrative that looked at what the world would look like if global warming was ending it and how humans were left/ adapting to it.
Inspired by Peter Kennard and Darrel Rees, I wanted to use photomontage to create a sense of reality in the surreality of the frame. I used vintage images of locations and people and (in the animation stage), used special effects to enhance the image.
I wanted to use the element of fear and enhance that with surrealism. In other words, I wanted to create scenes that are visually ridiculous and extreme but in the context of global warming, provide us with an uncertainty and insecurity. In the series is Tornado, Tsunami, Under Water World, Famine and Asteroid (asteroids aren't global warming but the idea was cool and i wanted to make it).
The images were sized and edited together as one print to make a leporello but I wanted to give these images a depth so I decided to animate them. The idea behind this was so that you could have different experience between the leporello print and the film e.g seeing something restrictive to the whole scene.
I designed the images to a screen format and began animating in after effects. You see TV broadcasts of destruction and vintage style adverts playing on the idea of the human race's 'screw it' mentality. The film uses perspective shots as you follow the camera through the scene as a fly on the wall: seeing 'it happen'.
Music composed by Sam Burgess (me)