Unlike many of our projects, “Where Are You Now” was created as an internal project based on the story/experience of Creative Director, Matt Vojacek. In 2018, after a pregnancy with some complications and much hope, Matt and his wife Megan lost their newborn daughter, Madeleine after being only 10 days old. While that may seem like one of the most tragic things that could ever happen, there was much reason for hope. In watching their sons handle the loss and their parents grief over the following weeks a few moments stood out to them. Kids do not grieve like adults. They ask direct questions and expect simple answers in return. When asking where his sister is, Matt & Megan would tell him, in Heaven, up in the sky. On one day, Benjamin decided that he wanted to write to Madeleine and send it to heaven on a balloon. Even though he knew he wasn’t likely to get a response, he was still hopeful that one day, he’ll be able to talk to his baby sister.
Services Used
- Writing
- Design & Illustration
- Hand drawn Animation
Approach
Once the story was written, we took a big step back to figure out what the best way to tell the story would be. Being an emotional story, we wanted to tell it in an expressive way and hand drawn animation is a good tool for that job. When trying to decide on the illustration style we’d use, the words we tossed around early on was “surreal” and “playful”. Throughout the process, these words acted as guides for us to make the best decisions we could. One of the challenges with every project is deciding what we want people to feel and how we’ll make them feel that way. For that we were really thoughtful about a couple things in particular; the pacing of the shots and the colors we used throughout.
Overall, this project was an exploration of telling an extremely personal story. We’re firm believers that animation can be used to tell stories to create all emotions and this was an experiment into sadness/hopefulness.
Later On
“Where are you now”, won Best In Animation category at the 2019 Creative Best awards. In 2020, the short film was an official selection at the Cleveland International Film festival.
