A to Z
"If you stop to think about it, you'll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters."
Micheal Ende, The Neverending Story.
A to Z is an animated alphabet that contains all the stories ever told and it's a reflection about the common threads of narration.
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Sara BuccellatoDirector
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Sara BuccellatoWriter
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Project Type:Animation, Experimental, Short, Student
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Genres:animation, surreal, experimental
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Runtime:2 minutes 30 seconds
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Completion Date:May 16, 2020
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Country of Origin:United Kingdom
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:Yes
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Student Project:Yes
Sara is a 2D animator, illustrator and concept designer. Her visual language reflects the way she perceives the world and how she creates new concepts by forming symbolic and emotive connections between things. Her work is heavily inspired by psychology, symbolism, surreal art and cinema. She graduated in classical studies and then studied comic-book design. She self-published comics, and worked as a freelancer, artist and graphic designer, creating book covers, logos, illustrations and CD covers, including the cover for Lostileostile, an album of the Italian band Marta sui Tubi. In 2019 she did an internship with the animation studio SentioSpace in London, and she created for them an animated postcard for their website 2050.cards. When she’s not drawing she usually spend time looking at cat videos or collecting weird objects that she finds in charity shops, she plays Dungeons & Dragons, goes to cinema, reads about philosophy, ancient myths and spirituality.
A to Z is my graduation movie. It's a reflection about the common threads that connect all the stories. I made a structure for my alphabet and I assigned each letter to a steps of the hero's journey theorized by Joseph Campbell. The letters act as the steps of the narration itself and they and they suggests an idea trought their shape, the interaction with simbols, their movements and transitions from one to the other. I focused on their perceived meaning, both as a letter of the alphabet and the meaning associated to their shape. I made a list of colours, animals, concepts and geometric shapes starting with that particular letter and from that I started sketching out ideas connecting all those elements togheter. Also, since the letters aren't just the actors, but they are also and represent their own narrative structure, I had to consider that they needed to convey a specific idea. The difficulty was to find the right balance between the figurative elements and the abstracts ones, and I opted to treat each letter differently and not using the same formula for everything. Some letters interact with figurative elements that give them extra meaning and a reading key, some other letters take the shape of a figurative object, and other are more abstract and shape focused.