In the semi-viral, Webby-nominated short film School Portrait, a grumpy school-portrait photographer berates his lovable subjects with his cynical views of the world, sadistically trying to elicit frowns for his photos. It's a simple concept, but the kids' reactions make the film stand out.
"We only needed a few beats of a genuine reaction" to make it work, says director Nick Scott.
To get those little moments, Scott cherry-picked the kids' responses to events and conversations not in the film, and then spliced them into actor Jonathan Rhodes' dialogue.
The best reaction, where the girl listens to Rhodes say "there isn't a pet heaven," was actually just something that happened when Scott was talking to the girl and then suddenly turned around.
Scott says the kids are not professional actors but instead participants in a regular drama class at a London school. He purposely wanted amateurs, he says, because he knew their reactions would be more genuine.
"It was very important that we had regular kids because we didn't want them to overdo it," he says.
So far the film has over a million views, a success that can be attributed, at least in part, to seeing the seriousness of the world's problems through the refreshing lens of young kids.
"At the present moment there are a lot of reasons to feel depressed," says Scott. "The economy, the climate. But with these kids we see their belief that things will get better."
Even though that belief is manufactured and stitched together in the film, it feels true. Scott says he and the rest of the crew didn't want to expose the kids to everything that Rhodes says in film because they didn’t think it was necessary to spoil the enthusiasm the film so cleverly captures.
"We wanted to make sure their purity and hope still shined through," he says.
