For the final project of my university degree, I set myself the challenge to write, direct, compose and animate a narrative short film. The premise of the film was built upon my dissertation piece on how to tell a story without spoken language - bypassing linguistic and cultural barriers.
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Leaning from influences within my dissertation such as Pixar's "Soul", I felt inspired to incorporate elements of Jazz/Soul within my film as the genre is heavily synonymous with storytelling and emotion. From this I began to build a story in which music and animation interacted with each other to progress the narrative.
I developed a semi-surrealist environment that resembled an American city street except for wacky-er buildings parallel to a piano road in which the character's footsteps would play the film's melody.
Ultimately, I developed a story about a man, who on his 30th birthday, receives a gift that returns him to a nostalgic view of his childhood. The film is designed to represent non-visual concepts such as nostalgia, dissatisfaction and childhood within its musical and animated storytelling.
From this, I worked to refine the flow of narrative through script revisions, then storyboards, until developing a rough animatic I could use as a reference point in production.
The music for the film was created by a small group of Nottingham-based musicians who created a range of audio segments that came together into a building kit I could fit within the animation's development. This was the most challenging aspect of the film to coordinate due to the interactive nature between the visuals and the sound.Â
As a thank you as well as a nice little Easter egg within the film, I based the ambient musician characters and their frog counterparts off of the musicians that worked on the music.
The final production was put together creating assets in Photoshop and animating them in After Effects, with post-production cleanup and editing handled in both After Effects and Premiere Pro. I was pleased to have this film shortlisted for the Aardman Academy Screening Prize at New Designers in 2025.
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