I DIRECTED A FILM FOR GREENPEACE YAAAAAY!

Short version:

RAAAAAA I DIRECTED A FILM WATCH IT NOW IGNORE THE THUMBNAIL






Long Version:

I directed a film for Greenpeace! It has many names. In the film itself it's called "EU vs CO2", on the Youtube page it's called "FIGHT BREAKS OUT IN EU PARLIAMENT", when you post it on Facebook it renames itself "BANNED: monster fights politician", which sort of gives the joke of the film away. You can call it whatever you like as long as you watch it. I like to call it Terry Bangles.

Greenpeace is concerned about car carbon emissions in Europe. Cars are currently responsible for about 12% of Europe's car emissions, and have steadily increased between 1990 and 2008. At the moment Greenpeace is trying to get EU parliament to impose more legislations on European car companies, ideally to cut carbon emissions in half by 2025. This would result in less oil drilling, less pollution, and more fuel economic cars. If that's something you'd like, you can sign the petition on the associated website at euvsco2.com .

But it's quite hard to get people interested in politicians in EU parliament debating an easy to ignore environmental threat. So we made things a bit more giant size with explosions and monsters and video games and kung fu and man nipples. Which area all things I heavily approve of.

I was hired to direct this by the lovely people at Man+Hatchet, an advertising company that occasionally transforms into a production company to make stuff like this brilliant video for Ecotricity. Everyone who works there is having babies constantly. CONSTANTLY.

At first it was a completely terrifying job. We had about 3 weeks to make a full blown animation with bits of video and stock footage and visual effects and AAAAAAAH. Oh and also Greenpeace didn't like our first draft design of the monster, which sort of looked like a cross between Rancor and Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas (in a good way), so we got epic artist Rob Cheetham (who also did the website art) to do another one:

I love his huge wrestling hands. So that was a ray of sunshine in a first week spent finding  animation companies and asking them if they'd do it, then getting phone calls politely telling us no, they wouldn't.

By the middle of the week things were looking completely awful. Then some good things happened. Firstly, we had a pep talk from Marcus Punter, an ex-Cartoon Network animator and games designer who knew a thing or two about making animation look good as economically as possibly. Take Johnny Bravo, which Marcus had worked on, which saved drawing time by cutting Johnny's movement down to essential poses, then having little wooshy blurry bits in between. The poses were so funny and dynamic and character defining, the lack of tweens (drawings of the "in between" movement) didn't matter.

Above: a full body turn and half a second of movement in 4 frames. Source: youtube.com/watch?v=Exe0IEB3hKs  

If we wanted to capture the aesthetic of a 1990s video game, we needed to think like that. In Street Fighter 2, the characters only has a handful of movement drawings/sprites that are re-used for every time they move or delivers a specific attack, but they're so distinct you instantly know what you're seeing. 

Above: Ryu kicking your ass in approximately three drawings. Source: http://www.spriters-resource.com/snes/supersf2

Reduce the fight sequence to its most important elements, as if someone was actually pressing buttons to make the politician or the monster repeatedly do the same attack, and have a collection of sprites we could move around and reuse without it feeling stale. That way, Marcus argued, we could get it done in time and make it look like an actual fighting game. That made us feel like we could actually do this damn thing. We even did a visual storyboard of how it could work if you reduced it to the most important poses:

 

Above: producer Simon Sanderson and M+H creative director Henry Cowling 

doing what would become 0:48-0:52 in the actual film.

The second good thing that happened was we met Chris Ollis, aka HappyToast. I've admired his work for ages on sites like B3ta, and he instantly got the style that we wanted. With minimal briefing he went away to start filling our DropBox up with useful 1990s game references, preliminary sketches of the monster for animation, and photo demos for potential walking animations using him covered in plastic bags:

CHRIS OLLIS IS A GOD.

At first he balked when we said we wanted to show movement with as many reused elements as possible, and sent us this test animation of the monster breathing to show that it "wouldn't work":

He seemed put out when we said we really liked it.

We found an excellent studio called Once Were Farmers (they're called that because they once were farmers) that agreed to take on these animation sprites, backgrounds and cutscenes and stick them together into an actual animation, with camera movement and shaky bits and parallax perspective bits and suchlike. Now things were finally getting somewhere. 

So next we had to film the live action elements and get an actor to represent our politician. We had a lengthy day's casting, then went and chose someone we already knew: editor, filmmaker, and occasional movie star Rob Hill. We filmed Rob against a greenscreen both doing politician speechy things to replace some stock footage of Sarkozy, then got him to do all the fighting poses we'd need for the sprites:

The greenscreen shoot was as fun as it looks, in fact it was one of the funnest shoots I've done. Greenscreen shoots are amazing! You go to somewhere really easy to get to with totally controllable lighting and comfy chairs and nice coffee and you can have a crew of about two people (Eben Bolter and AJ Golesworthy) doing lighting and camera and everything just works. I can see why all the big film directors are getting rid of real sets and meticulous art direction and just doing that instead. 

Also it's great to work with an actor who doesn't really see himself as an actor. Rob spends as much time keying greenscreen as he does standing in front of it, so he knew what we needed and did it very well. Then later in the week he sat at home with a glass of wine recording himself doing additional dialogue for the fighting bits, adjusted his own sound levels and sent it over to us. Rob probably could have set up a greenscreen and filmed himself completely on his own if we'd asked him. The last line of the film is improvised by him.

Oh also a day after the shoot he made a video of him punching his son in the face and stuck it on Youtube. 

This video now has over a million views. Which is way more views than we have. And also he's the new face of Greenpeace. Um...

BTW the guy who did the visual effects for the live action footage was Chris Taylor, he's brilliant and also did visual effects for Doctor Who and The Dark Knight Rises. You know, just throwing that out there.

Meanwhile we still had a bunch of vaguely Dragonball Z meets Phoenix Wright cutscenes to do, as well as something that would symbolise a big chunk of Europe as a continuous rolling fighting game background. Rob Cheetham worked mainly on the backgrounds, which took ages to be finalised, as we jumped between something simple but video gamey, with lots of repeated elements and jagged pixels:

To something elaborate but not video gamey, with lots of blurry bits:

Until we ended up with our gorgeous final thing. The London bit's my favourite, in the final there's a bit of animated rain there. If we had time we'd have had cliffs and rivers on either side of the London segment that the characters could jump over.

The cutscenes were sketched out by Rob Cheetham, photographed by us in demos, photographed by us in the actual photoshoot, roughly sketched again by Rob, then drawn by Joe Dennis. Like this!

Yaaaaaay! ART. 

So now things were starting to turn into a bit of a factory. Chris Ollis churned out sprites of the monster moving, attacking, doing stuff with the environment, and general explosions for whenever anyone delivered a particularly good punch. Joe made pixelly drawings of fighting game intros and politicians going Super Saiyan. Rob drew layers of background so you could get a sense of perspective. And Once Were Farmers put everything together with bangs and whizzes and cool bits. Originally we used photos of Rob doing all the fighty bits in the film, Mortal Kombat style, but then they were turned into cartoon sprites by Chris Ollis and Scott Morris from Once Were Farmers:

It was at this stage that being a director of an animation who couldn't draw himself started to feel weird. I've got more experience working on stop motion animated projects where it's easier to pitch in and get involved, so I started to feel like Bill Lumbergh in Office Space, constantly Skype bothering people already stretched working to a deadline to ask for more explosions or more muscely bits or for stuff to be more pixelly, without just doing it myself. My one direct artwork contribution to this whole project was the title, that was added on the very last day and was meant to be just a demo but we liked it. BEHOLD MY ARTISTIC POSITIONING OF FONTS. 

It replaces a fully drawn, animated and voiced extra cutscene, so I hope that didn't annoy anyone. Sorry!

What else? Oh yeah. The sound design is glorious. Chris Green did it. The first pass didn't quite as video gamey as I'd imagined, I mentioned chiptune music people who had worked out how to filter sounds through old Game Boys, he just replied with this picture:

Then did just that. It's perfect. I love the slight distortion to Rob's voice, it really does sound like he's coming from a game cartridge that needed to store everything in 2mb. 

I'm enormously pleased with this film. It had such a great team of people behind it making fantastic, funny, incredibly creative stuff, and going the extra mile even when they didn't have to. It looks beautiful, it's full of so many things I love, and I can't stop watching it. So yeah. Thanks everyone, I really hope I haven't forgotten anybody. 

Oh and seeing as this was animated with reusable sprites doing different punches and kicks, it would only take a bit of work to turn this into an actual, working video game. You know, just throwing it out there. 

- Will.

PS here's a great Marvel v Capcom-style animation Chris did for just after the final punch that we didn't have time to squeeze in. AWESOME PUNCH MARDIS GRAS PARTY:

PPS Hooray it's doing a little bit better on Youtube than it was a few days ago! After a German commenter said that it should have been translated into German I left a long comment, translated into German by my girlfriend, that you can activate subtitles for it in loads of different languages including German. Nobody seems to have noticed, but there's that. It would be great to hear it dubbed in different languages, like that guy that dubbed Alien Easter in Russian, but I dunno if I can personally give other people permission. I'd love to hear it in Japanese. 

Re: Fwd: Reply Girls: a retrospective

I realised I never wrote anything about these videos I made. Maybe I should do that, as on their own they're quite confusing. If you were the sort of person who liked Youtube videos in early 2012, you might remember a trend called Reply Girls.

On Youtube you can reply to a video with another video instead of a comment. Maybe you want to link your video to a similar popular video to encourage people to watch it, like this person replying to the Alien Easter film with this brilliant stop motion and After Effects lego thing. Or maybe you just want to say how you feel using a webcam instead of a keyboard, like this guy did to a couple of the One Minute One Take vids. By replying to that video, it showed up as a link and thumbnail underneath the video and probably in the sidebar too, so your video got a little popularity boost.

The term "Reply Girls" most prominently refers to a couple of Youtubers called MeganSpeaks and TheReplyGirl rather than general girls who reply to stuff. They were incredibly prolific, producing hundreds of videos in just a few months, replying to as many popular Youtube videos as possible. They didn't exactly say anything in these replies. Mostly they just described what happened in the video, sometimes vaguely recommending it without really saying why, sometimes just in a state of confusion, as if they hadn't fully understood what they'd just seen but still needed to describe it to you right away. Then they'd ask you to subscribe to their channel and plopped a few revenue-generating ads on the bottom (at the time MeganSpeaks had a sponsorship deal with Machinima).

MeganSpeaks

TheReplyGirl

I guess it could be useful. Like if you were super busy and needed someone else to tell you what was happening in all these Youtube videos the kids love these days. Or you have a short memory and needed to be reminded of exactly what you'd seen just after you'd seen it. I think they wanted to be those You've Been Framed-ish Youtube people that other people go to for video recommendations. Or they were just trying to connect to the community in their own way, like thousands of other video bloggers. One of their most prominent features were low-cut, cleavage enhancing tops that were emphasised in the thumbnails (MeganSpeaks had those giant arrows, TheReplyGirl looked incredibly uncomfortable and tended to frame out her eyebrows). And they got very, very popular very, very quickly.

Thousands of Youtube users were instinctively clicking on their videos, then leaving furiously misogynistic comments for daring to use a picture of an attractive lady to distract them from videos of people playing Minecraft for nearly a minute. But it didn't matter, the Reply Girls were getting thousands of views, quite a few subscribers, and maybe even a respectable amount of advertising money. Soon the sidebars for any popular video were filled with links to all their videos replying to it and similar videos, and people got even angrier.

My first response to this was "What a brilliant idea." I wanted to be a Reply Girl. There's something incredibly reassuring and flattering about the idea of quickly churning out a hundred videos in a day, sticking a handsome picture of yourself on the thumbnail, then knowing that because of this all of these videos will gain several thousand views and will, in a sense, be popular. It didn't take me very long to realise that it wasn't going to happen for me. So I went for the next best thing: complete deception.

This somehow led to me making a weird arrangement with Nic Lamont. Nic is an amazing comic writer and actor who I've worked with for ages and deserves way better than this. We - me, her and Geoff - came up with ideas for a few parody Reply Girls videos, both replying to their videos and replying to other new popular videos. Then we'd record Nic adlibbing. Then Geoff filmed me lip syncing to her talking, in a variety of weird locations. I wanted to run through the woods and be under a single swinging lightbulb in a darkened room, but we were a bit strapped for time and learning to lipsync to someone else's lines is really hard. Me and Geoff did duct tape my boobs into boob shapes as much as we could, and did something weird involving tomato soup and a hospital gown. Then we'd use a picture of Nic in the thumbnail wearing the pushy uppyiest bra she could find. So people would click on a picture of her expecting standard Reply Girl stuff, and find a video of a strange ladyman doing Reply Girl stuff instead. We did this one as a response to a MeganSpeaks video, and this one as a response to a CassetteBoy video (CassetteBoy actually commented and said nice things, which was exciting!)

It was a weird concept. I wanted to make more quick videos based on flash in the pan online stuff, so there wasn't much of a pause between coming up with the idea and making the damn thing. We recorded Nic doing loads more responses for potential future videos, and while I can't say I was too happy with my video bits I'm incredibly sad we can't use her audio bits somewhere, they were hilarious. Especially her one about Yogscast, I might dig that out again and have another listen.

Unfortunately Reply Girls were a shorter flash in the pan than I thought. So many people complained about them that Youtube actually rewrote their algorithm to make it harder for people to see their videos. The Reply Girls were backing down and morphing from celebrities lots of people watched and hated to ordinary videobloggers that not many people watched or had strong opinions about.  MeganSpeaks, who we'd parodied specifically, started claiming that almost every video she'd ever made had been some kind of elaborate meta-parody of itself. These things all started to happen the week I planned to upload the videos. Nooooo, stop it! We can't parody you if nobody knows who you are! Our videos will be even harder to understand! Also I felt uncomfortable when the misogynistic Youtube commenters seemed to think we were on their side, against "those fucking Re: bitches" as one commenter said. In some ways that's worse than someone hurling abuse at you on Youtube. If prejudiced people are angry with you, at least you're pissing off the right sort of people. If they're agreeing with you, you can't help feeling like there's something wrong. Even when we were recording the videos we thought about parodying TheReplyGirl, but she seemed so genuinely upset about the hatred her videos seemed to be collecting that we felt bad and gave her a wide berth. I didn't hate them, I wanted to join them.

So that was a potential series that ended before it started. I thought about not releasing them at all, the actual video parts feel wrong to me. But my mum really loved them. She was watched them over and over, and inviting friends round and explaining what a Reply Girl was just so she could show them the video of her son wearing a dress and talking with a silly lady voice. Sometimes she even called me up just to come over and show the video again, and stick a copy on her laptop to watch when she felt bad. It was strange because she was such an honest and vocal critic of mine, she said what she liked but she also said what she disliked, or if she didn't think something was going to be popular or she thought I could do better. Sometimes I think she watched them so much because she knew they would be some of the last films of mine she would see before she died. Then I think about what a disappointment I've been, that I haven't produced some soaring and beautiful epic masterpiece that she can watch with pride, instead she got this. But she always told me to stop being so gloomy with this blog. Maybe she liked seeing me be acting in front of a camera for a change. Maybe she just thought they were funny. I hope she liked them.

- Will.

Jane Furnival 1957 - 2012

Last month my mother died. We buried her ashes tonight, a quiet little unmarked patch of ground with what might one day be a nice rose on top. It started raining not long afterwards. I'm hopeful.

This was not unexpected. She had been diagnosed with cancer about three years ago. Despite her best efforts to the contrary, it had been progressively getting worse. Although I've been trying to keep it separate from the various silly things I make, it was something that had been building in my mind like steam in a kettle. I imagined that her death would an apocalyptic event: me and everyone in my immediate family would just stop in our tracks for at least a year, rocking backwards and forwards as the cobwebs grow around us.

In fact I'm busier than ever, with more actual paid directing jobs all on the immediate horizon. This is what I think she would have wanted. My mother was the hardest worker I know. In the last few months it was her tactic for saying alive - she'd give herself so many projects and plans and things to do that she couldn't possibly stop. She's written books and recorded audiobooks from her bed when she couldn't sleep any more. A writer and journalist, throughout her life if something bad happened to her, she'd turn it into a newspaper article or fit it into a book. She never sat down and let problems overwhelm her, she'd just keep working through it, and do that work on her own terms.

Grief is one of the more bizarre of human emotions, it comes and goes when you don't expect it. Her actual passing didn't cause the complete mental breakdown I was expecting, perhaps because it's been on the horizon for so long. Since then it's been more of a gradual realisation: in a concrete way you will never hear this person say this thing again, you will never go here with this person again, this person will never see this with you, this will never happen again. It seems fairly obvious to say that this person will never reappear happy and waving as if back from a long holiday, but brains are pretty stupid sometimes.

So that's why I think I'm writing this: to explain that I'm okay, but if I get a bit more mopey than usual this might be why. I sincerely hope I don't, there's far too many fun things to do.

Will.

Further media:

Online obituaries:

Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2152395/Jane-Furnival-I-die-dog-me.html

UK Press Gazette: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=49326

Sutton Guardian: http://www.suttonguardian.co.uk/news/9712314.Inspirational_broadcaster_dies_aged_55/?ref=rss

The last article she ever wrote: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2115080/Im-borrowed-time--I-m-loving-moment.html

Her last TV appearance on ITV's This Morning: http://www.itv.com/thismorning/life/jane-furnival-living-with-terminal-cancer/

Alien: The Easter Edition

With Prometheus just around the corner, we decided to remake Ridley Scott's original Alien as an Easter movie. It's pretty short so it's probably best if you just watch it (Warning: contains chocolatey gore and violent fabric puppets). Features John Seaward from The Inbetweeners, Patrick Fysh who once won Come Dine With Me with his experimental pea dishes, James Duckworth who is a very talented musician as well as an acting man, the ever lovely Nic Carter and Simon Maeder (who have done a lot of nonsense with me in the past), and the smashing Maria Askew.

SHORT VERSION: Hope you like the film, if you do pass it to everyone you know, and have a fantastic chocolatey Easter!

Will.

LONG VERSION: The following is interspersed with images taken by the cast and crew, including Geoff, Kellie, Danielle, Kathryn, and whoever I gave my camera to when it wasn't being used for anything. I've checked with as many people as possible, but if you don't feel comfortable with me using any of these pictures please let me know.

Before I say any more I should properly credit the cast and crew:

CAST

James Duckworth

John Seaward

Nic Lamont

Patrick Fysh

Maria Askew

Simon Maeder

CREW

Written by Geoff Gedroyc and Will Tribble

Director & Editor: Will Tribble

Producer and DP: Geoff Gedroyc

Composer: James Duckworth

Sound Design: James Hyde & De Lane Lea Studios

End music: "Merry Go" by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com

Camera Operator: George Burt

Camera and Sound Supervisor: Tom McDaniel

Prop Master & SFX Supervisor: Kellie Black

Art Director: Kathryn Kane

Assistant Art Directors: Esther Nosworthy & Lottie Louise McDowell

Art Assistants: Danielle McNiven, Joe Park, Sarah Pearman

General Lovely Help: Danish Qazi & Viktoria Sahl

Thanks to Anna for sending us some nice pictures of things

Thanks for Charlie for getting up early and helping

Special thanks to Sutton Film Makers (http://www.suttonfilm.co.uk/) for helping us get equipment and people and generally being brilliant.

Special thanks to Sally McCormack for providing us with theatre flats for spaceship building

Special thanks to Will's family for putting up with a lot of stuff and breezeblocks.

PRODUCTION

It was shot entirely at my family house.

The alien spaceship bit was done in the garage with a whole lot of blackcloth, hastily assembled by Kathryn and anyone that wasn't immediately needed while we were shooting the human spaceship bit. The human spaceship bit was done in my family living room, which had been covered in Dexter-style tarp from floor to ceiling to soak up any spray goo (and we did need the ceiling tarp at least once). Since we did that bit first I'll talk about it first.

Bunny Burster

The human spaceship was called the Chocstromo. It was a commercial towing vehicle transporting a refinery processing 20,000,000 tons of caramel minerals, mined from the planet Fudgeotron, in the gooey chewy outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. They answer a distress signal from the...Space....Chockeys? Look, it's hard to keep making chocolatey versions of Alien. Try coming up with a chocolatey pun for Xenomorph or LV-426 or Weyland-Yutani, or even Alien. Geoff only just stopped me from calling the film Eggstraterrestrials. You get the idea.

Anyway, the Chocstromo set was made from a collection of theatre flats borrowed from Sally McCormack, who runs Matrix Theatre . These were covered in wallpaper, and decorated with bits of cardboard, piping, etc. by Kathryn, Esther, Lottie and the rest of their team. It took about a week and enough trips to B&Q to build several sheds.

(guess which of those three cameras was used for filming video and which was used mainly for recording sound. Camera technology is weird.)

The chestburster was a cute little bunny puppet with a basket specially made by Esther. We had three in case they were completely ruined by a stomach burst, but in the end one lasted pretty well. Could people see that his basket had chocolate eggs in it, hence the "DON'T EAT IT!" line? I wasn't sure. Geoff imagined it as a chocolate easter bunny, which would have worked well in many ways, not so well in others.

The table is a Homebase plastic picnic table with a hole cut in the middle. James knelt behind the table, with a fake body in front of him connected to his arms and head, through which the chestburster exploded/was puppeteered. This is pretty much how it was done in the original film (except the actors knew what was going to happen).

The squirty bits and fake body for this scene were built by Kellie "Miss Pearl Grey" Black. There was a brilliant stomach bubbling effect she created with some vinegar and bicarbonate, sadly we couldn't really justify a close up in the final film. However it did help to make James' stomach taste completely disgusting, he didn't like doing the bits where he eats his guts. The chocolate around his mouth was tastier, but looks more genuinely horrifying than I expected.

We bought the cast several identical sets of the same clothing in case we wanted to do any reshoots, but, like the bunny, we just ended up making do with one. Shame really, we might have bought fancier clothing if we'd known. Nic bought a special Ripley afro wig because she's hardcore like that.

By the way here's the badge designs I made for the crew and John's character, I was quite proud of them and they don't get many close ups in the film.

Facehugger bit

The Facehugger bit was filmed last, between the hours of about 9pm and 1:45am. Because clocks went forward that day this somehow became 2:45am. I'm very thankful and sorry for everyone that stuck around that long, especially Viktoria who could have escaped if she wanted and probably didn't know what she was getting herself in for.

The alien egg is made of painted papier mâché and chickenwire. Talks about how big the egg actually needed to be got more and more Chinese Whisperated, until a lot of work had been put into making an egg that was about four foot tall by three foot wide. It's still in the garage and I'm not quite sure what to do with it.

I was concerned that it was a bit too massive to look like an Easter egg - if you don't instantly realise what it is, the film is in trouble. So in the last few days before the shoot Kathryn, Dani, Esther and Sarah quickly put together a much smaller one. It's wrapped in coloured cellophane, because large quantities of patterened tinfoil is quite hard to get.

The facehugger itself is a beautiful puppet built by Kellie. It's made of fabric, with poseable wire legs, a toy snake for a tail, and a back covered in chocolate buttons.

It was attached to James' face by the legs, pulled off and into the egg using a piece of fishing wire, and then we played the whole thing in reverse.

While we were shooting it I was concerned that the wire we used was a bit too obvious in shot. Then I watched Alien again and saw this:

You might notice a large white wire hanging from the alien's back, cunningly disguised by some slime. They did exactly the same thing, hooray!

Most of James' lines are improvised by him. It was quite late at night and he was pretty tired, but in a way that adds to his John Hurt semi-impression.

POST-PRODUCTION

James did some brilliant music for the opening sequence and first scene, but didn't have enough time to make a super happy funtime piece of music for the end, so we used some royalty free music from Kevin MacLeod at Incompetech.

The final sound mix was done by James Hyde at De Lane Lea Studios, which normally does ADR for big feature films, James took some time out (and stayed up for like 24 hours) to work on this.

The title photo was taken by Geoff. Here's a full image of the space Easter egg from the opening titles, I made it in Photoshop:

COOL STORY BRO

And that's the film! I very much hope you like it, it was a garguantuan effort for a freely accessible internet sketch less than 3 minutes long. If you do like it, please do pass it around to everyone you know.

Once again, thanks so much to everyone that worked on it, you did an absolutely incredible job. I might be biased but I think the film looks pretty goddamn fantastic.

Wooooooooooooooooo!

Will.

P.S. OTHER SCENES FROM ALIEN WE COULD HAVE DONE BUT DIDN'T

- The Easter Bunny eventually mutates into a full sized person in a bunny suit, it has a second set of adorable little jaws that rip people's heads off and/or fill their mouths with mini eggs.

- In a dramatic fight scene John's head is knocked off and a chocolate fountain sprays from his neck, turns out Dr Notarobotson is actually a robot. He hs a body filled with Maltesers and strawberry bootlaces.

- While escaping, Nic finds the Easter Bunny's lair, in which several crew members are being forcefed so much chocolate that they gradually turn into Easter eggs.