Claire De Lune (2019)

This piece was created during my sophomore year of high school, for an animation assignment where we had to take a piece of music and animate to it. I selected the piece Clair De Lune or (Suite Bergamasque: Clair De Lune, No 3) by Claude Debussy. Listening to this piece of music always gave me a feeling of melancholic nostalgia. As I listened, I always pictured an older gentleman reminiscing of times that he wished he could go back to. So I decided to animate an older gentleman, as he sees visions of his late wife. 

When actually animating, I was inspired by UPA shorts from the 1950s like "Rooty Toot Toot", "Gerald McBoing-Boing", and "The Unicorn in the Garden." This comes across best in color schemes and character designs. I added a film grain effect in a further attempt to elicit similar emotional responses to the aforementioned UPA films. 

This animation of mine has since stayed with me for many reasons. A few weeks after completion, I submitted this film to my high school's film festival where it was unfortunately sandwiched between live action comedic shorts made by peers of mine. This meant that the audience had zero time to reflect on what they had seen, which is ironically what the whole film is about. After I graduated High School I received an email from one of the teachers that ran the high school film festival asking if they could use this piece for a website for the film fest. That's when It really hit me that the piece had resonated within the viewers, even if I wasn't there to witness it. On a more personal note however, this film sticks with me because of how I feel about it. It reminds me of my life only a year before the COVID-19 Pandemic. It reminds me of the person I was when I made the film. The people I knew, the classrooms and buildings I was in. Thinking of this film has a similar response in me to the responses of the older gentleman protagonist throughout the film. Just minus the potentially corporeal manifestations of memories in the physical plane.

Ultimately, despite this being one of my oldest films. It remains one of my absolute favorites.