The Game is On!

In a fictional land called London, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson meet a curious client: the toymaker Joseph …

The Adventure of the Girl with the Light Blue Hair is the first episode of The Game is On!, a series of short animated films that put copyright and creativity under the magnifying glass of Sherlock Holmes. Co-produced by the internationally renowned Professor Ronan Deazley as part of the AHRC-funded activities of CopyrightUser.org. The Game is On! offers a unique, research-led and open access resource for school-aged learners and other creative users of copyright. Drawing inspiration from numerous well-known copyright and public domain works, as well as recent copyright litigation, the series provides a springboard for exploring key principles and ideas underpinning copyright law and creativity.

The Adventure of the Girl with the Light Blue Hair comes accompanied by a number of Case Files: supplementary educational materials aimed at suggesting points of discussion about copyright for teachers and students – copyrightuser.org/the-game-is-on/episode-1

Credits

Written, Produced and Directed by Ronan Deazley and Bartolomeo Meletti
Investigator, CopyrightUser.org: Kristofer Erickson
Art Direction / Design / Animation: Marco Bagni
Illustrations: Davide Bonazzi
Music / SFX: Sarc:o
Voice-over Artists londonvoiceover.co.uk:
Joseph – Vincent Brimble
Sherlock Holmes – Cliff Chapman
John Watson – Anton Saunders

Character Evolution

The main characters are evolutions of their previous representation by artists like Sidney Paget, Carlo Chiostri, Walt Disney, Basil Rathbone and Benedict Cumberbatch; combined with other artwork such as Magritte’s The Treachery of Images brought into a modern hipster t-shirt!

Reference Moodboard

In creating this short film we made use of other people’s work, on average, about once every three seconds. While the work is original in its own right, it is also a mosaic, a patchwork of cultural references, providing real examples of lawful reuse of copyright works. The film includes more than 80 references to and quotations of books, graphic novels, soundtracks, paintings, and photographs, sketches and storyboards, film and television scripts, set designs and movie posters, as well as reported copyright cases. How many of these can you spot?