Cornershop - I'm a Wooden Soldier. By Astrid Edwards

This particular film began under Brexit and was delivered just before our first lockdown. It is a little homage to the elements and themes of punk fanzine really...something close to mine and the band's collective teenage experience. I'd lurched into teenagehood on a steady diet of hand-stapled Sniffin' Glue, early ID fanzines and Spare Rib. With that and our current government in mind, I applied my slightly angry diy punk ethic to the actual making of the video. This pretty much involved me creating original artwork, cutting it up then making photomontages of it by hand with good old-fashioned scissors, a scalpel, some glue and a lot of paper with the intermittent re-photographing or old school photocopy thrown in. I then hand animated it, shot it, appeared in it (as I didn't have the budget for a performer) and edited it together myself mostly frame by frame. I worked with the brilliant designer/animator Sim Tennant on some of the more complex scenes in afterfx with some re-augmented vintage footage chucked in. It was really free-ing to go back to the punk basics of my youth and work like this. It was also really painstaking but fun - and much like the song, it felt apt and relevant to be working in that way at this moment. This is my second collaboration with Cornershop. Both films are quite raw but very different - what's great is that the band are always so trusting and supportive of my ideas - this one particularly so as it literally did come together frame by frame by frame. Analog for the digital generation...

Conceived, hand animated, directed, produced, edited by Astrid Edwards Rockmother Films

Additional digital animation Simeon Tennant