1.0 video FrameRate https://framerate.tv < Content warning - indirect discussion of knife crime, no graphic content > Knife Crime ruins lives. Joint Enterprise means people can be prosecuted for serious crime, even if they did not take part directly. Together, these factors are a huge risk for young people, as well as those around them. The concept for this film was to create a high-impact, relatable animation to help turn young people away from carrying, using or associating with knives. The content was all born from the lived experiences of a group of young leaders. The message and the medium needed to be authentic, arresting and honest to connect with the audience - young people most at risk of becoming involved with knife crime, and those around them that might remain silent until it's too late. The heart of the project came from workshops - members of the Hertfordshire Youth Commission took part in writing and concept generation exercises and shared their lived experiences around Knife Crime. Elements from the written word pieces they created were combined to form the poem spoken in the piece - an emotive, human, and relatable first-person account of the (fictional) events and consequences that cascaded from one single event with a blade. I took the script and the Youth Commissioners' concepts for visuals and dove into research, lookdev, and storyboarding. The look was high-contrast and gritty - monochrome with flashes of blue and red, and different treatments for our lead and other characters. Our lead character had to be someone the viewer could connect with. In Character Creator 5 I built him out, deliberately giving him slightly heightened proportions to help him stand out from the rest. I used motion capture to bring the him character to life - acting out the beats in a Rokoko motion capture suit with face capture, allowing me to get exactly the performance moments we needed. Cinema4D and Redshift were used to bring everything together in animation, making use of You and Me Academy's YMA Painterly and Toon Studio shaders with HelloLuxxx's Redshift Essential Toon Materials to build a crunchy, halftoned look for the characters and a painterly, inky world for them to live in. The poem was voiced by four members of the Youth Commission. We rotate through their reads as the poem progresses, then their voices combine to a chorus at the end, reinforcing that a single act can affect many people. <Edited Sept 2026 to update Credits> Mike Choo https://framerate.tv/profile/MikeChoo https://nddkbgiieurtcomzihzq.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/thumbnails/1db16c2c-51eb-44bc-9eaa-06c772c73451/b43afd32-98f9-4506-96fb-7b6a6b6c8766.jpg?t=1777047080790 1280 720 1280 720 <iframe src="https://framerate.tv/embed/b43afd32-98f9-4506-96fb-7b6a6b6c8766" width="1280" height="720" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>