Hello and welcome back to my TedTalk.
The theme today is my first experience as an animation director. I directed my first short film in a global pandemic (the last one was 100 years ago, so pretty impressive yeah).
After my small mental breakdown in march – hehe all my plans getting canceled and being unemployed with no clear direction for the future, I had little to no idea of what I would make a film about. So I promised myself that I will draw every morning with my morning coffee. Started with a page or two per day, and at one point, I was using every coffee/lunch break to fill my notebook with doodles.
Spending a month of animating around 8 hours per day on my Children Society project, I felt mentally exhausted, and coming up with a new idea for a film in just a couple of days, seemed impossible. Then I saw him:
Standing alone on the page with his glorious long armpit hair, waiting for me to notice him. I desperately needed to animate him. A couple of days later, I saw a medieval drawing of a man riding himself instead of a horse and thought that this could be the perfect story for my gentleman – him standing still on a horse that is not a horse but it is the same person eating grass. I loved the idea of him being alone with himself and started thinking in this direction. I came up with many different scenarios of group social activities that he can do alone with altered versions of himself.
When I was designing the background I asked myself what was the message of my film – I loved the character and the activities he was performing, but I still had no idea why I love it so much and what I want to say with that. I was listening to different episodes from a podcast by Sam Harris where the central theme was the human psyche and the pandemic. I started thinking about the way the whole situation made me feel – a timeless existence where there was no beginning and no end, just an endless stream of thought. Wanted to show that in my designs, so made a mood board:
After choosing my palette I started playing with the background:
The background visualizes the dreamy inner world of the character. The vast, empty horizon so far behind the character, emphasizes the idea of timelessness and isolation.
The prosaic main character is a metaphor for the common nature of the emotions he experiences. The simplicity and goofiness of his look provoke empathy in the viewer. We are all, in a way or another, products of our repetitive patterns that bring short-lived joy.
Even though I loved the theme of endless suffering, I wanted it to build up and escalate at one point. Therefore, in the end, the camera zooms out and the viewer is invited onto the bigger picture – the character is just a little piece of a large system, a tiny dust particle in a galaxy where there are a thousand galaxies.
Deep down, we all live with the knowledge that we will die and that the universe is so massive that we don’t matter. Routines are familiar, comforting, and self-defying. However, we still get up from bed every morning, play leapfrog, buy ice cream, and continue our patterns. Although just like the character, we are unhappy and insignificant, we live for the moment of finally getting the ice-cream, even when we know we will drop it the next second. And what a moment it is!
Bread and butter,
Nicole