Film Info

Title: And Then

Summary:

My goal is to produce a 2-3 minute animated short using poetry, traditional drawn, two dimensional digital, and three dimensional digital media. My goal is to touch on an existential sense of awe and wonder that is felt more than understood. The film will fluctuate between the macrocosm of a particle’s journey through time and space and the microcosm of a young boy and an old woman’s relationship at different points in their lives.

Synopsis:

“And Then” is about contextualizing change. Many things change but change itself is a constant.

Project Description:

I would like to evoke more than portray. Loss is a force everyone is familiar with. Even if it is only ice cream melting before it’s time, everyone has experienced that feeling of pain. However, loss is only one way to look at change. Decomposition is crucial for new ideas to develop. Without change there would be no movement, no life. The idea of loss is in fact merely an emotionalized concept of change. Nothing is lost it just changes, and if we are not ready to accept that change we perceive it as loss. The particles which momentarily coalesce to form our bodies have been around forever and have been part of countless things before they became a part of us, and they will be part of countless things after we are no more.

Change is impossible without time, and time can be defined by the change which transpires over a given duration. However, time is an elusive concept. What is time? How is now different from then and how will tomorrow be different than today? In my research I’ve found that we know surprisingly little about time. We know that it has some relation to distance and velocity, but there is much we still don’t know and we may never know. I think the true strength of animation is its ability to abstract our perception of time and change and allow us to perceive these concepts in ways outside of our practical experience. However, without tying these theoretical concepts to an emotional anchor they are easily lost.

“I am” starts with a light bulb turning on, or is it the beginning of the universe? As the universe is being born we follow a single burning red speck as it makes its way through the cosmos. We morph to a worn but well maintained one room apartment. There is an old woman here teaching a young man how to fix a bike. Then we morph back into the particle as it coalesces with other particles into a planet. As we go back and forth between the two we watch the young man grow and the apartment decay, we watch the particle transition from one state to another as the planet it has become part of changes. The climax of the film will occur when the particle and the boy end up in the apartment as the old woman passes away. It does not end. It only changes.