This work in progress will be a video essay documentary. It is based on my personal irrational interest for penguins, especially considering I had never met any of these animals or had any meaningful contact with them. It is my graduation film from the Academy of Media Arts of Cologne.
Middle Island at night, home to a small colony of Little Penguins
It is an attempt at linking my personal relationship to these funny birds with topics too large to tackle individually. Eco tourism, extinction story telling, media representation, all merging in a whirlwind of images shot on a shaky handheld camera in Australia, captured from video games featuring penguins, on top of a groovy soundtrack.
The film will be ready by the end of 2025, and will be presented to however many festivals think it’s a good fit in their program.
Leylet Europa is a 15 minute anima-doc film. Directed by Ronida Alsino and Léo Beaudoin, it is based on the testimony of 4 people who fled from Syria to Europe. As they tell their journey, their unique experiences blend into one another, allowing it to create collective picture without getting lost in the crowd of refugees.
Based on the voices of the protagonists, the visuals are kept minimal, playing with shades of black and white as a support base for the sound. Footage of the research trip in the Balkans have been included as well.
The project was initiated by Ronida Alsino and Hannah Platzer. In 2015, as a lot of people decided to flee Syria to Europe, the media coverage often reported on shock statements and brutal images. Leylet Europa was an attempt to go against the flow of the news and to rehumanise the people behind the numbers. Animation was later chosen as a medium for a variety of reasons: to guarantee a better anonymity of the protagonists, to merge together stories that are different while having the same goal, and to reduce the image content, sometimes resorting to a pitch black screen, in order to keep the focus on the voices. Léo Beaudoin then joined the team to work on the animation.
Still from Leylet Europa
Leylet Europa is a student film created within the curriculum of the Academy of Media Arts of Cologne. It was financially supported by the Freundeskreis der KHM e.V. and the “Auf geht’s” Stipendium.
Credits
Sound design, mix and music: Joreng Jung Animation: Jessica Poon, Juho Lee Camera: Hannah Platzer, Bella Usabaev Set design: Elenor Kopka Compositing: Léo Beaudoin Editing: Ronida Alsino Color grading: Ewald Hentze Supervision: Isabel Herguera Project organisation: Ursula Reber
Selected in
26.04.2024 – International Animation Stuttgart – Special KHM program
03.05.2024 – International Short film festival Oberhausen – NRW competition
16.05.2024 – Neisse Film festival – International competition
15.01.2025 – Mönchengladbach Film evening “post migration Audiovisions”
21.03.2025 – LAKFF Landshuter Film festival – International competition
16.05.2025 – Weimar university – Guest for the seminar “Realität enfesselt”
Derelict is a first person walking simulator. It lets you explore an open air museum that was built by sentient creatures who found the remains of humanity, long after its disappearance. How did they make sense of all the more or less meaningful things humans left behind? An audio guide accompanies you along in this eerie scenery.
Right but… Why did you do that? The starting point was the realisation that our civilization may not be as sustainable as we might think. I initially wanted to make an animated film showing what would be left of us humans, if we were to disappear. I wanted to depict a wasteland with ruins and old human artefacts, with nature slowly reclaiming space. But the more I tried to materialise that, the more the project shifted towards the interactive and the absurd.
Help! The game stutters and is super slow. What should I do? I see three potential solutions. In order of ease of application:
In game you can press Escape and click Options > Graphics and reduce resolution and quality. Setting it to Medium or Low should improve things.
Check if your drivers for your graphics card are up to date.
You… Do have a graphics card right? If you don’t, it might be tricky for your PC to run this game, sorry! See if your system matches the listed hardware above. If it doesn’t, try to run the game on a different computer that does.
Mr Owl is a fictional character that I created. It’s an owl with human traits (speech, clothes, feelings, expressions, walk…). He lives in London around 1910, and appears for the first time on my facebook page on Monday the 19th of September 2016.
First appearance of Mr Owl
The second time he is featured is the next day. From there, I started a series posting an image evey day. There was a weekly pattern because every Monday I collected all the drawings of the past week on a blog post and gave a little bit of context and insight from my perspective as the creator. Some weeks were too busy so I would skip those.
A good part of the story is available on my instagram
It is all black and white (except the cover), comprises 100 pages, 94 of them are illustrated. The format is A5.
Technical details
The books collect almost every drawing in the posts above, and a couple of exclusive ones. The majority of the drawings were redrawn, and the majority of the text was rewritten to match the medium so I believe the book is somewhat different from what you can experience online. I made a video explaining all of this (I added subtitles if my accent is too hard to understand). Information might be redundant but here you go :
Some pictures taken from the test version I have made at a local printer:
Cover and pencils to scaleMe happyPeaceful owl for a peaceful bookWhat’s inside
Windows 10
Mac OS X
Linux
