After is a documentary animation that traces the emotional journey of three people as they journey from isolation and despair to discover a newfound hope in their lives. Clay, Paint on glass, Sculpture Courtesy of the National Film and Television School Director & Animator Kim Noce http://www.britfilms.com/britishfilms/catalogue/browse/?id=5750E03A1ae1924BF2oUo4318335 Press Pack TECHNICAL DATA “After” 2005 6 mins 30 secs DigiBeta/Beta SP 16:9 FHA Colour Dolby Surround Principle Crew Director: T. Kim Noce Producer: Annalise Davis Director of Photography: Matthias Hauer and Kamaljeet Negi Editor: Benjamin Binderup Sound Designer: Leo Sedgley Composer: Peter Gosling Sound Recordist: Ivor Talbot/ Adele Fletcher Assistant animator: Ali Charmi Kaori Hamilton Cast/ interviewee voices: Helen Barnes Anonymous Henry Moore Original music Title: “After” 6 minutes Peter Gosling The music is an original composition for the film “After” where the music itself, the sound and the voices of the interviewee are intertwined and merged into each other Tequinique Clay, Paint on glass, Sculpture, AFX composite Short Synopsis ‘After’ is a documentary animation that traces the emotional journey of three people as they journey from isolation and despair to discover a newfound hope in their lives. Long Synopsis ‘After’ is a documentary animation that uses the voices of three people, intertwined into one emotional journey. They begin the film feeling isolated and alone. The clay animation shows a lonely vulnerable figure, who does not know how to cope with life. Slowly their depression deepens and turns into something more visceral. They totally reject their bodies, and move into their heads. The voices overlap and grow panicked and incomprehensible, while the clay becomes increasingly messy. Desperate, the voices try to find a way out of the world, out of the chaos in their heads, out of life itself. The clay turns into a bottle of pills being swallowed. And suddenly the chaos and panic turns into blackness. Slowly, out of the void we begin to hear slight sounds. We hears the words ‘You either kill yourself…or you don’t.’ Slowly, very slowly, the blackness disappears, and we see flecks of gold flit across the screen. The voices talk about beginning to find hope, as the animation turns into paint on glass: red and gold images becoming more fluid and more peaceful. Finally, the voices talk about coming out of that very dark place and approaching life from a new, fresh perspective. They learn to accept who they are and stop looking for the dark in everything. The paint on glass turns into a warm, vibrant gold clay sculpture. We see fragments of a gold person as it slowly comes together to become a whole human being. The music swells as the voices become increasingly optimistic, talking about finally having hope and finding enjoyment in life. The final image is of a gold face staring into the camera. Production Notes Kim, the animation director, had thought about doing a documentary animation for some time. She was interested in exploring the experiences of people who had been suicidal but got over it. When she teamed up with Annalise, her producer, she had an idea of the sort of people she wanted to interview in order to get this emotional journey. Our first step was to find the right people to be interviewed. This proved very difficult and took some months. We advertised on websites, through counselling centres and word of mouth, none of which gave a response. Eventually the most successful route was when we asked the local newspaper to do an article on the film, asking people in the area if they would like to be interviewed. This got a good response and in the end Kim was able to interview four people. These interviews gave us hours of sound footage. We went through each of the interviews and tried to come up with similarities and consistencies between the emotional journeys. The key to this film was in finding the universal journey that they had all experienced - this film was always about one emotional journey, not three separate ones. Slowly, as we became more familiar with the material, we started to find a structure and similarity within the interviews. They could be divided into four ‘sections’ – initial feelings of isolation, leading to desperation and suicide. Then there was a ‘bridge’ between the suicidal thoughts and the beginning of recovery, finally leading to a new, hopeful ending. Not perfection, not total happiness, but an understanding and acceptance of who they were. We wrote out a two-page outline, which used sentences from the interviews to tell the emotional journey of the film. Once we had these four sections, we asked each member of the production team to come up with some kind of material for