"Beginnings are rare and fleeting. All we are left with in life is a long and unavoidable journey to the end. Describe the burdens you carry with you on this journey." I sent the above prompt to friends and colleagues and asked for any artistic response. I received numerous poems, songs, short stories, etc. I took all of the responses and stitched together the verses, stories, and emotions into a narrative following the protagonist through a day in his life. My goal was to give a snapshot of the mental health of those around me and remind everyone that they are not alone in their sadness.
0.0Weighed down and despondent from crushing depression, Millie tries to escape the daily grind by deciding today will be different. However, she must first confront her trauma before it consumes her.
0.0Ginger, a recent widow, takes up autoerotic asphyxiation to work up the nerve to kill her abusive mother-in-law, Ginny.
5.5At a college in Rome, a professor, nicknamed "Dodo" is in a deep depression. His stunningly beautiful wife has just left him for another man. Dodo wants her back very badly and has erotic daydreams about her. A beautiful young student in his class asks him for a ride home and seduces the lucky man, but still he wonders about his wife and her lover.
4.0A man stuck in time of his greatest trauma grew up suppressing it in order to avoid being judged; thinking that it was all his fault. Years of working as a psychotherapist would help him solve a rebus with some help from his clients.
0.0A short film with dialogue for Eason Chan's Mandarin song "Don't Mind Me" 社交恐懼癌 (from his most recent album "Chin Up"), which was produced as an extended backstory for the music video. The Chinese title literally translates as "social anxiety cancer". Starring Eason Chan himself, along with a guest appearance from Tony Leung Chiu-Wai.
Darang is a story about a girl named Akemi and her desire to fulfill her longing for Elmo, she found herself trapped in a prison of her own making. Until she met Samuel who has so much resemblance with Elmo, from the time Samuel lives with her as a boarder her sexual urges intensely awakened believing that Samuel can take the place of her long lost sweetheart, Elmo who has a brush with the law and gets killed in a shoot out when they were escaping…
6.8Spain, 1950s. Montse's agoraphobia keeps her locked in a sinister apartment in Madrid and her only link to reality is the little sister she lost her youth raising. But one day, a reckless young neighbor, Carlos, falls down the stairwell and drags himself to their door. Someone has entered the shrew's nest... perhaps he'll never leave.
0.0Iman Dimalanta, a 21-year-old lymphoma cancer survivor, journaled all her thoughts through her entire cancer experience. With such a heavy topic, Iman provides a bright and uplifting energy to the screen. Her outlook on life and lighthearted, admirable, a
6.0ALEXANDER THE GRAPE, an unfinished cut-paper animated short from Jim Henson from 1965, relates the fable of a young grape with big ambitions who learns that it is better to accept yourself than to try to be something you are not. The short was reconstructed from film and audio elements; images from Jim’s storyboard fill in missing segments of the animation.
8.0An animated film made from approximately 1700 laser printed photo(collage)s, manipulated by hand.
5.8A teen girl disappears after trying to meet men online in order to escape her small town. Apparently, only her best friend worries enough to investigate the mystery.
6.5A small Bavarian village is renowned for its "Ruby Glass" glass blowing works. When the foreman of the works dies suddenly without revealing the secret of the Ruby Glass, the town slides into a deep depression, and the owner of the glassworks becomes obssessed with the lost secret.
7.7Sakura Kinomoto, a Card Captor, wins a game of chance and is awarded a trip to Hong Kong, along with her best friend Tomoyo and her rival, Syaoran Li. It turns out that the ancient rival of Clow Reed, the creator of the mysterious and powerful Clow Cards, summoned them, and she's out for revenge. A battle ensues, and secrets are revealed about Clow Reed's shady past and Sakura's connection to him.
8.4Cobb, a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: "inception", the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious.
0.0Following a breakup, Dustin tries to figure out what to do next.
6.0The short follows the dream of a young boy in which strange whale teleports him to a fantasy land where a happy cat named Pero (modeled after the character in the Nagagutsu wo Haita Neko anime that serves as Toei Animation's mascot) appears. The piece is entirely dialogueless.
5.0"Mouris’s film, YOU’RE NOT REAL PRETTY BUT YOU’RE MINE…, built upon the strongest elements of QUICK DREAM, and added a pop music soundtrack. Mouris says, “I shot another 100 foot roll on classmate Jerry Strawbridge’s home animation stand, and edited that into the best sequences from QUICK DREAM. The whole film was a tongue-in-cheek series of odd couples/couplings, which the title suggested. The FRANK FILM photo collage animation evolved here.” - Yale
5.8Elephants Dream is the story of two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protege Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect. Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D animated “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite Blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.
7.3Two drifters, one a gentle but slow giant, try to make money working the fields during the Depression so they can fulfill their dreams.
