LCC’s Head of Animation Tim Shore, has been commissioned by Film London to make one of three short films for ‘Dickens 2012‘, a global celebration of the life and work of Charles Dickens to mark his 200th birthday. The films will be screened during the Dickens on Film season at BFI Southbank, the largest ever film and TV retrospective dedicated to the Victorian author, and are expected to tour nationally and internationally.

Tim’s film – Fits and Starts of Restlessness – will be shot in Saffron Hill and Hatton Garden in Farringdon, and Smithfield, mainly at night. This was the site of a notorious 19th century ‘rookery’ where crime and vice flourished, and Fagin’s den in Oliver Twist. An animated sequence will use archive maps and sewer plans from the 1800s. The title is taken from Dickens’ essay Nightwalks: “it was always the case that London, as if in imitation of individual citizens belonging to it, had expiring fits and starts of restlessness.”

The images will be accompanied by voices speaking extracts from the notebooks of Victorian ‘moral entrepreneur’ William Augustus Miles, and the interviews he conducted with juvenile offenders in 1836, on board the prison hulk Euryalus at Chatham, where they were being held after sentencing, prior to transportation.

Tim is collaborating with co-director Gary Thomas, and Dr Heather Shore, author of Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London. He is working with cinematographer Martin Testar, who has worked with artists Gillian Wearing, Duncan Campbell, Johan Grimonprez, and others. The producer is Tracy Bass, who has worked on award winning productions commissioned by the UK Film Council, LAFVA, BBC and Channel 4; her artist’s film projects include Communion by Nina Danino and Fourth Wall by Clemens Von Wedemeyer at the Barbican.