This is my first short movie, and because of this, I went into a really deep research period of a couple of months. I looked at different films, took screenshots of scenes where I thought the storytelling was extraordinary, printed those scenes out and analyzed them.
Here I painted around 500 different silhouettes of the main character. It was really important that I got this right, hence why I tried so many different variations.
Above is another notebook I kept where I did storyboards and made notes about different scenes.
For this project I saved up money and did something I've never done before: travel outside Europe. More specifically, I went to Tokyo. Most of the time during my stay I just walked around with a camera and took photos of architecture, some of them displayed above. To get the most out of my two weeks staying there, I didn't bring a laptop and I went all alone with only one backpack as bagage. The reason for this was as well that I wanted to feel completely lonely, which I was, the only contact I had with anyone was sending a message to my girlfriend who was back in London just so she knew I was ok. I did meet people and talk to them on the street though, but very few throughout my 14 day stay. So besides taking these photographs, I kept a sort of diary of what I did everyday, ideas for this movie that popped up and also my feelings of being in total solitude from everything I've ever known on the other side of the world to then try to translate them into the movie through visuals.
For the main font used not only in the poster, but also in the digital clock in the movie, I decided to make my own font to convey the same design language I implemented in the rest of the movie.
Here you can see a quick process video of some of the scenes in the movie. I built 99% of it from scratch, which was a real challenge, but well worth it in the end!
This whole project has been about me expressing some very personal emotions and thoughts without using words, by working really hard on one project and learning about visual storytelling (etc), so it will translate well to other people, especially those who recognises themselves in that feeling, which is totally up to the viewer themselves.
Enjoy.
