Our Picks: Pretty Polly by Layla Atkinson / Trunk Animation

Pretty Polly by Layla Atkinson / Trunk Animation

Trunk Animation embarked on one of their most challenging jobs to date. The London based animation house has created a video for Shirley Collins’ new album Lodestar, her first for 38 years. The internationally acclaimed folksinger’s version of “Pretty Polly” is set in the Appalachian Mountains in the 1700s. This beautiful ballad, which she discovered with Alan Lomax in 1959 during a tour of North America, set Layla and Trunk on a journey that required turning a mountain of cardboard and timber into forests, meadows, clouds and rolling hills, building a film set, bringing in tons of camera equipment and packing Trunk’s small studio with eighteen animators, scene movers, puppeteers, lighting and camera operators on the hottest September day in the last 100 years.