MOST parents enjoy filming a bit of home video with their children but Warrnambool’s Richard Pritchard has gone a giant step further.
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The visual effects artist’s previous work on Hollywood projects, which include Mad Max and Prometheus, inspired a family video filmed at Stingray Bay.
The one-minute clip was made as an advertisement encouraging children to “say sorry” and features an impressive animated creature named Rocky the Rock Giant. Pritchard said the project had been a labour of love since writing and filming the video with Sierra, 6, and Max, 4, last year.
"I was designing and building some creatures for Pepsi in Japan and I thought, 'This is so cool. I might create my own one and put my own kid in a commercial’,” he said.
"I’d just do a little bit and then take three months off in between work.
“We came up with an ad idea promoting morals for little kids. It was a good way to treat my kids like they were the client. We sat down with a storyboard and got their ideas and went down (to Stingray Bay) and shot it all in an hour.
"They love showing their friends. They act like they're producers.”
He said Rocky the Rock Giant was now the subject of his latest online children’s book series, which became a family project inspired by their bedtime stories.
"I do puppet stories at night with them so a lot of it has come from the things I teach them through stories,” Pritchard said.
"The online books came from sitting down with the kids and letting them write all of the stories.
“Whenever we go to the cafe I take a notepad and I get the kids to come up with stories and the characters’ names and what they do.
"The Lost Manners, Listen To Mum - they've all come from these crazy ideas.”
The books have taught Sierra and Max how to write stories, but also how they end up online, Pritchard said.
"So long as the kids enjoy it and I enjoy doing it with them, it’s a good way to time stamp their young lives, so they can look back as teenagers at all the things we've done together.”
He said while animation was part of his everyday job, getting behind the camera took him out of his comfort zone.
"There was a big learning curve for a lot of things I did on it,” he said.
"I couldn't figure out how to do sand kicks, with the giant feet pressing into the sand, so I just went back down and shot it lower.
“Initially (Rocky) was never meant to be moving. It just got more and more crazy.”