"No More" is an experimental animated short film. It is a depiction of the instability of the quality of life of an Alzheimer’s patient. It was my Bachelor’s project, and was inspired by personal events. The entire theme of the film is minimalistic in both the visual and the auditory; the purpose of this was to portray the raw feeling and instability of awareness of Alzheimer’s disease beyond the well-known label of just “forgetfulness”.
It is done using Rotoscoping, with almost 4000 frames drawn/traced digitally by hand. The film was finished on August 16th 2014.
Research
In order to understand the world of Alzheimer’s, I needed to talk with people who lived with it. These were sketches that were drawn during the interviews. Through these observations, I would try and find certain thinking patterns and interesting stories.
Storyboard
The theme that is maintained throughout the whole film conveys extreme emptiness, loneliness, hallucinations, and repetition. Which are the most important keywords intended for the project, to shed more light on the other unseen parts of Alzheimer’s disease that do not only cover memory loss. The time which shots take is lengthy and slow, where multiple actions may occur in just one shot. Almost no close shots are taken, because maintaining long and medium shots captured the metaphorical essence of the emptiness that which the character feels.
The storyboard of the film was naturally altered many times until a satisfactory scenario was reached. The overall theme was to be as minimalistic as possible even in shot size variety, hence having all shots being still. In the end, some details were changed/removed from the final cut.
Early Concept Art
The goal was to represent how identity and self-awareness can become easily weak and misunderstood; and so the idea was to simplify the human figure to the point where it is nothing but a vague outline, the head becomes box-like, and the face has almost no features.
One of the ideas for the aesthetic style was to create a decaying colour palette that actually decays gradually as the film progresses. This would be shown in the form of colours fading out, details being slowly deformed or removed, and reality/household objects misshaped.
This drawing was in the beginning of the phase where the concept was being developed. I was trying out different styles while maintaining a simple, yet expressive way of using strokes, shapes, and colours throughout.
Credits
Created and animated by Norhan Kamal
Supervised by Ahmad Saqfalhait and Marouan Omara
