A woman pays her toll for the ferryman and waits for him to take her to the afterlife, but he never comes.
Now she must figure out how to go on.
Inspiration
In fall of 2018, during a six month period I was waking up multiple times in the middle of the night from nightmares and vivid dreams. I began drawing some of these chronic dreams I was having, and shared them with my Drawing and Design class. In spring of 2019, I started taking an experimental animation class and developed the idea for the film, using these drawings as inspiration.
I was heavily inspired by Marika Hackman's 2015 album We Slept At Last, and developed ideas about how women's sadness and suffering is usually depicted in art as gracefully tragic. This is scene by many melancholic paintings of women in water, such as the famous painting of Ophelia by John Everett Millais. I also was considering how women are seen by others as fragile due to their awareness of their own feelings, and so I wanted to draw comparisons to glass tree frogs, which have see-through skin.
Reference Footage
I took some reference footage of what I needed to animate in the film. Here I used tape to stick a quarter to the wall, in order to simulate the character plucking the moon out of the sky.
Unused Footage
I originally intended for the film to be longer, but the final project in Experimental Animation only allowed for a few weeks to animate the film, so I did not have the time to expand upon other scenes like the ones below, and so I had to cut them.
Final Film
I finished the film with the help of a friend that drew the final background for me. I had a lot of fun sound designing this film in particular, as the coin falling in water and the soundscape of the frog-filled bog was really enjoyable to create. The film screened at the 2019 NYU Spring Animation Festival and the 2019 New Visions New Voices festival.