The Leap

‘The Leap’ is a short animated film, exploring themes of friendship and mental health, loosely based on my own experience with anxiety. As an artist, I use animation as a way to understand and translate the weird thoughts in my brain. My art is strange because it is an outlet for my own strangeness.

This has been a deeply personal project for me. At the same time as basing the short on my personal mental health experiences, I wanted to highlight the importance of community care and reaching out to each other.

Synopsis

To add some elements of humor and playfulness to the topic, this film is set in an abstract fantasy universe with anthropomorphic characters, and centers around a frog as the protagonist. At the beginning of the film, the frog is feeling lonely and isolated, and seen having anxious and negative thoughts in their imagination. Because of hunger, the frog leaves their mushroom house to find food, and unexpectedly ends up finding company. Throughout the film, the frogs’ negative thoughts resurface a couple of times, but the ending is a happy one.

Extra Info

• -The short combines digital frame-by-frame animation and hand-drawn watercolour animation. These two techniques are intended to differentiate between reality and the frog’s mental space.
• -Household objects have been used for sound design to make the sound feel more unique, as everyone’s mental health story is unique.
• -The background of the meeting place was a collage to help the environment convey confusion and overwhelm.
• -The visual language of this film is heavily inspired by the types of sandbox and narrative games that I find enjoyable and mentally calming.