Cut-Out Animation, 01:20min, 2023
In the quiet depths of the forest, a small anxious jerboa is on a journey to try and bury a secret.
The Making of I'll Make Sure No One Knows
In this experimental collaboration, I was given a one-minute soundtrack as the starting point. There was no context provided—no explanation of the sound designer's vision, no discussion about the themes or intentions behind the music. I had to build a narrative purely from my own emotional and creative response to the sound. I couldn't directly communicate with the sound designer, so the process was entirely intuitive, relying on the associations, moods, and images that the soundtrack triggered for me. This nature of the project excited me and I enjoyed it greatly.
Once I found my theme after listening to the one-minute soundtrack many times—feelings of shame or guilt that one would want to rid themselves of—I started sketching my main character, a sneaky jerboa:
I've always been fascinated by the multiplane animation technique, and this project gave me the opportunity to experiment with it. To bring my character to life using this method, I had to break the character down into different body parts, each of which would be animated separately on the glass planes. It was a meticulous process—thinking about how the arms, legs, head, facial features and torso would each need to move in relation to one another— but it was incredibly rewarding to see how the inanimate objects of cut-out paper layers come to life:
The multiplane technique fitted for my vision of creating force-perspective spaces that would set the mood and abstract the atmosphere of the film- all ideas that were inspired by the one-minute soundtrack. By layering the different planes, I could create the illusion of deep environments—like a dense forest or an endless pond. The depth created by the technique allowed me to exaggerate the sense of distance and scale, making the spaces feel vast and maybe overwhelming. This was essential in conveying the character's feeling of urgency, as well as their sense of being lost in an environment that feels both expansive and inescapable. Here you can see what the multiplane looks like under the camera:
Once the project was fully animated and edited, it was revealed for the first time to the sound designer who composed the one-minute soundtrack. This collaboration led me, the sound designer Sarah-Louise Davila, and the editor Bettina Zironi to work together on my graduation film Me and You and Smoke (in progress).