UK/USA | 6 Episodes | 3 minutes | 2021

““All in a Day’s Work” is a series of comedy shorts revealing the ups, downs - and sometimes-painful truths - of life as an entrepreneur or small business owner.

Collaborating with London-based creative directors at It’s Nice That, I wrote and directed six short films of “All In A Day’s Work” for Mailchimp Present - an entertainment platform celebrating the entrepreneurial spirit.”

It's Nice That

“In these films, you will meet a first-time employer, an unstoppable baker, an overworked fashion designer + mom, a struggling coworker, a silicon valley young startup, and a product designer who is facing financial troubles. Hope the humor and joy will lighten your mood after a whole day of hard work!”

“The characters and their environments in the films are all handcrafted by the team of fabricators, and brought to life through the process of stop-motion animation.

The six stories are universal but also unique in their own way. In order to keep the uniqueness of each story, we give each film totally different color palettes and production designs. For example, the florist is full of bright colored flowers made out of felting wool, the bakery is filled with fresh “baked” tiny baguettes with delectably shiny crusts to cheer up your appetite.”

“From tiny baguettes with delectably shiny crusts to a puddle of wool made to look like a water spillage, it’s the smallest details that really make Siqi Song’s six episodes of All in a Day’s Work so delightful to watch.”

— It's Nice That

“In these six episodes, we meet a host of small-business owners, all of whom are going through an emotional rollercoaster. There’s an anxious florist who is struggling with her new employee’s hayfever (in ‘First Hire’); a founder whose carefully crafted Zoom set-up comes crashing down around him on an important video call (in ‘Silicon Valley Legends’); and even a product designer who tries to charm his way through an investor meeting, despite some less-than-impressive profit figures (in ‘Financial Woes’). Meet all the entrepreneurs below.”

“Every texture in the world comes with its own personality. This cast of diverse characters is handcrafted with felted wool - a warm fuzzy material that brings so much life into our stories. The facial expressions are hand-drawn animation on top of the stop motion animation footage. ”

“By amplifying textures, stop motion animation is perfect for stories like these, making the every day become more vivid. When you zoom in on the camera with a microlens, it captures images of a whole different world that we’ve never seen with human eyes. That’s what makes this filmmaking technique so special and alive.”

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“Starting with a paragraph of treatment for each episode, I worked with It’s Nice That and Mailchimp creative teams to further develop the ideas into scripts, storyboards, animatic, and eventually - short films.

The fact that the stories are so relatable also helped me express the emotional subtleties in the scripts. Because filmmakers are also entrepreneurs, we run our own creative businesses with every film we make. Each episode hits a different part of a journey that I’ve been on as a startup filmmaker.”

“The is the part when animation makes magics. My favorite part of the production!

Mailchimp and It’s Nice That was keen for the films to be as internationally relatable as possible and so wanted them to avoid dialogue entirely. Without language, the characters can only express their emotion in the stories through body language and facial expressions.

Watch some of the behind-the-scenes timelapse below.”