Battery Daddy — Jeon Seungbae, 2021
This is a story of two points of view. The first is the relationship between a human father and his son, the second is a battery father and his family. On a trip to the great outdoors with his son, our human dad very quickly gets into trouble when the weather takes a turn for the worse. Stuck in the middle of a flood he uses his torch to signal help for him and his son. Unbeknown to the pair, battery dad gets to work inside the torch, ensuring the light works. As the torch fills with water, the battery dad starts peddling furiously to keep the light on. Thankfully the human parent and his son are spotted by a rescue helicopter and returned home. The battery dad is then free again to leave the confines of the torch and return to his own family, who have waited patiently for his return.
In this felt stop-motion animation, the two fathers are connected by their need to return to be available for their families, bringing the idea that it is love which makes us powerful. The film can also be seen as a metaphor for our use electrical energy, often taking it for granted, without always appreciating the wider implications of its use for our planet.
Classroom Activities
Print All- Critical
- Cultural
- Creative
- Clip Details
Critical
- What type of animation is this? What other kinds of animation do you know? (Stop motion/clay animation/3D CGI/2D line drawing/hand-drawn etc.) Can you give examples of these?
- Why does the director show us the car, teddy and dinosaur at the start? How does this link with the other things we see in the first 02:10 of the film? (Electricity usage, reliance etc.)
- What do we find out about the family in the first 2 minutes of the film? Are they close? Where do they live? How do we know the parents care for their son? How do they spend their time? What evidence do we have?
- Watch the film from 02:20 to 02:40. What three things does the director do to show us the change in mood of the film? Think about how the colours, sounds and characters are used to change the mood (e.g. How do the colours change? Is there a contrast in the sounds that are used? What did the characters do that pre-empted the change in direction of the story?)
- What colour is Battery Daddy at the start? What do we associate with this colour, feelings/emotions/thoughts? Why does the director have Battery Daddy change colour when his children jump on him? What does this show the audience?
Cultural
- Pupils should list all the appliances they have at home that use electricity. These could be then written down, cut out, and organised into a Venn diagram: Batteries, Mains, Both
- Families can all be different. Discuss the different family set ups within the class, explaining there is no right or wrong, and everyone’s family is different. Construct short family trees of immediate family members. (Be aware that this may be a sensitive topic and should be approached with caution.)
- Ask the pupils who they care about/love. This could an introduction to the different kinds of love, what we do for the people we care for and who cares for us. Pupils could create a little mind map of the different ways they are cared for.
- Talk about sustainability and what this means (appropriate to age/stage). Research/discuss different ways to create electricity that are sustainable. What ways are best for Scotland? Which methods are less appropriate for Scotland. Why?
Creative
WRITE
- Create a story that starts with a nice day but turns dangerous. Ideas could be brainstormed as a class, or in smaller learning groups. Like the film, the solution should have a happy resolution.
- Write a story involving an inanimate object. They should have an interesting adventure based around what they are (e.g. a pair of scissors that rescues flies from a spider’s web).
FILMMAKING
- Using the short story about an inanimate object, create a short animation showing one small part of the journey the object went on (e.g. a pair of scissors walking across a table). This could be done with cut-outs of the object in various poses.
DRAMA
- Take the roles of members of the battery family, then devise the conversation that might have happened with the Battery Family when dad got home.
- Devise and recreate a short interview with the local news about the incident. It could be interesting to do this from the two viewpoints - the father and his son or Battery Daddy.
STEM
- Measure water fall in the playground over two weeks, investigating the different ways this could be recorded, and results shared.
- Investigate electricity created from batteries and other sources. This might include generating electricity from a small turbine.
- Consider ways to solve the issue of flash floods and build solutions from cardboard boxes and junk modelling.
Clip Details
| Year of Production | 2021 |
|---|---|
| Genre | Adventure, Stop-Motion |
| Curriculum Areas | Expressive Arts, Health and Wellbeing, Modern Languages, Literacy and English, Sciences, Technologies |
| Director | Jeon Seungbae |
| Country of Origin | Korea |
| Medium / Content | 3D Animation, Fiction, Colour, Sound, No Dialogue |
| Themes | Feelings, Relationships, Danger / Fear, Work / Ambition, Identity / Self |
| Clip Length | 06:15 |
| Clip Length | 06:15 |
| Age Group | P1-P4, P5-P7 |
