FataMorgana
Deckle Edged
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2019
- Posts
- 6,216
From her site Fish People:
In 2022, with war breaking out in Ukraine, I decided I wanted to make an anti-war animation. In particular, I hoped to draw attention to the children caught up in war.
I based the storyboard around the song, Snowflake, which was sung by my son when he was a child. I think his performance is extremely moving and although I‘d originally written the song to capture his beautiful descant voice before he entered adolescence, it has taken on a haunting new meaning within the context of this animation.
The original track runs for over seven minutes, but as animations take a long time to make, it made a lot of sense to shorten it to three or four minutes. I was concerned that the song might lose something by being edited so intensely but actually it’s held up pretty well.
I knew I wanted the featured character to be a child caught up in war, so I made a very rough, off the cuff story board.
Although I’d initially thought to make the character a human child – a little girl – I settled on the idea of a Caucasian pygmy shrew (Ukrainian shrew): a tiny, fragile little creature. I felt that people might have more empathy for a vulnerable little animal than a human…
This little shrew would take a journey on a moonlit, winter’s night through a war-torn city, initially unaware of what was going on around her in this land of the giants. She can sense that she’s being called by a kind of spiritual presence… HOPE.
https://www.katebush.com/news_article/meet-little-shrew/
