The Spark

Lina lives with her father Kjell in a small wooden cabin at the edge of the forest. While her father works in the forest, Lina loves to spend her time exploring nature. But one day, when a magically glowing pine cone catches her eye, she embarks on a magical journey deep into the dark and mysterious forest.

This 2D animated short film (10 min.) was my bachelor project. The production team consisted of four people. Our intention was to create a visual narrative that would not only take the audience on an emotional journey, but also carry a deeper meaning. Since we wanted to tell the story without any spoken word, we had to pay even more attention to the nuances of the visual language.

The story was inspired by traditional fairy tales. Some parallels include a clear division of roles, magical powers, and a challenge for the protagonist. Since our film still featured modern narrative elements and contemporary themes, we were clearly producing a modern fairy tale!

As we only had one semester for the bachelor project, we decided to focus our efforts on the trailer. Since we had already storyboarded the whole film, we were able to start illustrating and animating almost simultaneously.

Lina's hair turned out to be particularly difficult to animate as we wanted to avoid animating each strand of hair separately. After some experimentation, we found a clever combination of some After Effects scripts that allowed the hair to sway automatically according to the head movement. It was a real time saver and allowed us to focus on creating detailed character animations!

Since we had a lot of layers to animate, we created a visual animation system using scripts in After Effects. This allowed us to use virtual joysticks to transition between extreme poses. Not only did this significantly reduce the number of keyframes, but it also made the animation process much easier!

Although we had all produced animated films before, this one was special for us. As it was the last film project of our studies, we made a special effort to create a memorable experience. Even though we were only making the trailer, we were more than happy with what we had achieved. After more than six months, the trailer was finally ready to be premiered in front of 3000 people at the Cinecitta Nuremberg!