Stepping Gently
An animated illustration of the filmmaker's father’s favorite poem, this film is a consideration of the poem’s role in the filmmaker’s life and an appreciation of the her father's work raising her and her brother.
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Carys BowenDirector / Animator
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Scott BowenVoice Actor
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Project Type:Animation, Short, Student
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Runtime:1 minute 1 second
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Completion Date:May 14, 2025
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Country of Origin:United States
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Country of Filming:United States
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:Yes - Oberlin College
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Digital Cinema Package:Unavailable
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Short. Sweet. Film Festival.Cleveland, Ohio
March 7, 2026 -
Sacred Underground Film FestivalSan Antonio, Texas
November 22, 2025 -
Columbus International Film & Animation FestivalColumbus, Ohio
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Render Me SoftlyCleveland, Ohio
Carys Bowen is a student at Oberlin College studying studio art, working primarily in animation and illustration. Often incorporating poetry or other quoted text, she is interested in how one connects to the rest of the world.
The artist explores ideas of emotional connection, imagination, and growing up, putting the quoted literature and her own experiences in conversation with each other in works like "The Little Brother Comic" (2024), which interweaves memories and poetry excerpts on the pages to consider siblinghood, and "Stepping Gently" (2025), an animated illustration of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Shoulders”. "Kitchens" (2024), in which the artist made miniatures of her memories of four kitchens that she did a lot of growing up in, is an exploration of place-making through time and narrative inspired by Joy Harjo’s poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here”.
Carys has shown work in Oberlin College Studio Art Department’s Art Walk and Art Hop every semester as well as twice in the Cinema and Media Department’s semesterly student screenings. In 2024 she showed an animated short in Moving Pictures, a student-organized presentation of visual art and music in conversation.
I illustrated the poem “Shoulders” by Naomi Shihab Nye through stop-motion animation with cut-paper silhouette puppets and colored tissue paper and with a voice over of the poem read by my father. This poem is one of my father’s favorites, and that tells me how much my father values the time and energy he has spent raising me and my brother. Because the poem refers to a man and his son, I think of this poem as depicting my father and my brother, but I understand the sentiment as pertaining to both of us children. The poem means more to me as my dad’s favorite poem than just as a poem on its own.
The majority of the project is analog stop-motion animation, using cardstock, colored tissue paper, and watercolor on tracing paper, and photographed with a digital camera and formatted in DragonFrame. A few digital additions, like the headlights on the cars, were added in PhotoShop after editing was finalized in PremierePro.
I’m trying to show the care described in this poem, that my father has given me and my brother, and I find the act of creating something with my hands, in an analog fashion even as I use digital tools as well, is how I can express this care. The texture of the paper coming through on screen helps show the tangible act of creating work with my hands, which is so important to me. The texture of the paper has care and alive-ness in it; the shapes I make with my hands and my scissors are full of care. When I started the project, it felt like a consideration of the role this poem has in my life, and now as I am ending it, I feel that it is an appreciation of my father’s work raising me and my brother.
