SCREEN TIME  
dir. Dimitry Brazhenko

The life of a character animated on a Wacom tablet, is forever changed, when he meets a companion created out of sand. This 5 minute animated short follows a classic romantic drama formula - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back – with the whimsical artist and evil creator as the antagonist.

The trope of the evil creator has often been used, not only in animated film, like the Oscar-winning Manipulation by Daniel Greaves, but also in literature, a great example of which is Vladimir Nabokov's short novel Pnin, where the narrator turns out to be the protagonist's greatest rival.

Is it possible to tell such a potentially complex story in slightly over 5 minutes?

Technically, everything is there – we understand the sequence of events and the relations between the protagonists and the antagonist. But what seems to be missing is a good introduction of the drawn character, so that we could empathize with him and feel the drama of the struggle which he is facing. 

Even in a five minute short, we should feel how the frustration is building up and how liberating the meeting with the sand lady is – after all, it's what makes our protagonist fly, without the help of his vicious maker.

The technique used, is a combination of animation drawn digitally with stop-motion sand animation. The drawn figure looks like an excercise in animating, which suggests that the author is at the beginning of his artistic journey. While I understand the symbolic value of juxtaposing a digitally created character, with a stop-motion one, I feel that in this case, a tablet is less cinematically expressive than, for example - paper, which offers more ways of playing and experimenting with the medium. Paper can be wrinkled and torn, it makes sounds when drawn on and rustles, when crumpled. It is more appealing to our senses. It would also allow to avoid the question of how a tablet would work, after being buried in sand for a thousand years. I understand, that it is a metaphor, but it puzzles us for a split-second, which is long enough to pull us out of the story.

The editing is mostly done using fade to black transitions, which has the effect of the scenes being detached and the story losing its flow and falling apart. Maybe it would be a good idea to play with the editing, using simple cuts? It could help to find rhythm in the story and build it in a more conscious and controlled way. I would encourage the author to continue on experimenting with various animation techniques. Ideas like this one give many possibilities to play with this medium. It could be an opportunity to build the characters of the protagonists as well as create a stronger dramatic structure, thus engaging the audience.