Projects in categories: Animation

Synopsis

Will, a frustrated animator, records a message to his mother. He explains “confessionally” that the film he was trying to make with his collaborator, Ainslie Henderson, failed. It was a film that they were making about her, after she contracted mouth cancer 5 years ago.
He explains the purpose of him talking to her now, in a candid way about it, might just be the final closure his Mum and family need. Why did he invent an imaginary cat called DOM who exists only on his computer and begins to get in the way? Needing to move on, the film they shot and animated will now explain what they were trying to do.
The film plays out from Will’s perspective today, a composition of thoughts, images and scenes - reflecting and editing together a letter to his mother. A self-reflective and self-referential film that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. This video message or ‘letter’ to her is a device that guides the film’s narrative. As if being ‘live edited’ the film has a playful urgency, enabling the viewer to authentically experience the journey with Will and the other characters.

Synopsis

Every day, a father and his son jump with a parachute from their vertiginous cold house, attached to a cliff, to go to the village on the ground, far away where they sell the ice they produce daily.
Official Selection Cannes Film Festival 2022 - Critics' Week Short Film Competition - World premiere
Academy Awards 2023 - Best Short Film (Animated) - Nomination

Synopsis

Exploring today’s voyeuristic culture of fear and uncertainty. A woman with extreme anxiety is devoured by four major preoccupations – the man she met by chance on a train, her dying father, her daughter’s safety, and the murder she dreams she has committed.
Official Selection Animafest Zagreb 2022
Official Selection Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2022

Synopsis

The opening shots of the Danish film "The Abyss", made in 1910, show scars from repeated screenings. The dance section was censored and so remains undamaged. In " Drift through mirrors", the story of the two characters in the scratched clip and the less worn one, is told as they step through a sequence of mirrors created with software filters.

Synopsis

FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth’s meditative imagery bears witness to landscapes in flux. The impact of human behaviour and the immense force of nature unfolds around you across an array of screens. This is a space where your perspective may shift.
Official Selection La Biennale Venice 2022

Synopsis

Journey into Artemisia Gentileschi’s chiaroscuro world and discover how this self-portrait shines a light on her life as a survivor, an internationally celebrated artist and a woman in 17th Century Italy.
Official Selection SXSW Festival 2022 - XR Experience Program - World premiere
Official Selection Venice Film Festival 2022

Synopsis

A Vietnamese-American single mother is confronted with the past and her culture when her traditional father takes over her kitchen.
Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

A spirited young woman persuades a hyena from London Zoo to take her place at a dinner dance held in her honour. Their plan requires a surprising amount of artistry and violence. Based on a story by artist Leonora Carrington, Elizabeth Hobbs celebrates her startling tale with paint and collage.
Official Selection Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2022 - World premiere
Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2023 - SXSW Film Festival 2023 Grand Jury Award - Winner - Animated Shorts

Synopsis

The astonishing true story of Scotland's most notorious imposter. Top of the class, acing exams, taking the lead in the school musical. He’s the model pupil, until he's unmasked…
In 1993, 16-year-old Brandon Lee enrolled at Bearsden Academy, a secondary school in a well-to-do suburb of Glasgow, Scotland. What followed over the next two years became the stuff of legend. Brandon had been privately tutored in Canada while he accompanied his mother, an opera diva, on tour before her tragic death. The preternaturally bright student surprised teachers by blazing toward his goal of entering medical school, displaying a wealth of knowledge beyond his years. Brandon found friends despite his initial awkwardness. He took bullied students under his wing, introduced classmates to seminal retro bands, and even starred in the school's production of South Pacific. But then his unbelievable secret was revealed.
Filmmaker Jono McLeod returns to his old school for a nostalgic look at the strange but true story of his former classmate, Brandon Lee. Utilising playful, period-specific animation, a pitch-perfect soundtrack, the memories of students and teachers, and the talents of Alan Cumming to bring the tale to life, My Old School offers more than one surprise along the way.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2022 - World premiere

Synopsis

The Alice of fifties animation visits the Wild West of fifties live action, but only through persistence of vision, they never meet in the same frame. The original Alice and the original Wild West were contemporaries too.

Synopsis

A little girl’s love for her bedridden Papa inspires a town in lockdown to make music from their windows.
Official Selection Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

This powerful virtual reality documentary series allows audiences to experience the alarming events of January 13, 2018, in Hawai‘i. This first chapter opens on an ordinary Saturday morning, when the entire population of Hawai‘i received a startling text message from the state Emergency Management Agency: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAI‘I. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” As cellular communication networks collapsed and panic took hold of the population, 1.4 million people — as well as their friends and relatives across the globe — came to understand the real, growing, and urgent nature of today’s nuclear threat.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2022 - New Frontier - World premiere
Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2022