everything beautiful and everything dead

everything beautiful
& everything dead

An animated short, inspired by the poem "What a wonderful way to go" by Leena Norms.

The film is fully written, produced and animated by Isabel Schulz on her own and aims to experiment with a more abstract way of storytelling - reminiscent of poetry - in animation. doom rolled in glitter tells its story with its restricted but very intentional use of color.

We are transported into a foreign colorless world only made up of grayscale, where its inhabitants strive after a way to turn their world colorful. They expeirience their biggest breakthrough – colorizing organic matter – but absorbed by exitement, they never stop to think about the concequences this endeavour might have on their world and themselves.

This short is a very bitter-bittersweet view on the possible end of the world, because humans are so in love with the world they have made for themselves that they cannot see that their creation is destroying them. And in that offering a different perspective on well known Climate Crisis narratives, that may already be falling onto deaf ears by a more general public. I feel that by moving into a more fictitious space and creating a foreign world that falls apart it allows viewers to take a step back and start a genuine conversation about what action is necessary without affronting viewers and making some defensive.

What a wonderful way to go,
that we loved the world too much to speak of its going,
and us with it, ravelled up in each other;
the daily fireworks of lunch boxes lost
and long fights about tea towels, talk of
apocalypse mislaid among the school trip
forms and well-thumbed books about
star-crossed dramas between two small
skeletons who only wished for the other to live.

What a wonderful way to go,
the kind of denial that has a tenderness to it.
Let the future dead plains know that we
were too vigorously wrapped up
in each other to look up at the sky
and notice the damp spots there,
for when you are in love you don't have time
to spare to hark to landlords about
light fittings. There will always be time.

What a wonderful way to go,
and awful too; the lavish child who launches
rockets while bodies writhe in the streets,
and fingerpaints forevers onto crumbling
walls; the way we crown the five people
closest to our face and forget the rest.
And so the moon blinks, disappointed
but not surprised, leaves through the back door,
hoping his next stop will really last.

— Leena Norms, "Bargain Bin Rom-Com" S.40

Styleframes 10.2023

Characters

Storyboard 2023

Mood 10.2022

inspirationen