What’s in your pot?

In my film, What’s in your pot?, I sought to portray my interpretation of the animal abuse cases about pets that ended up in restaurant kitchens. Animals like chickens, pigs, rabbits can be treated as pets but if they were not under vigilance could get kidnapped and become an ingredient. However, they are tragic stories for their owners because those pets were family to them, that is why there was a rabbit’s point of view to let the audience misunderstand that it was the young lady’s daughter’s view, to treat the animal as important as oneself beloved child’s.

By using animation as a platform, I can play around with the character designs, backgrounds and the compositions of the views. The plenty of liberty supported me on recreations of unimaginable scenes, like the rabbit perspective. I was inspired by the Hungarian animated film The Fly directed by Ferenc Rofusz that relates a fly journey from its angles, views and colour blind. Then I explored how rabbits perceive the world and I stuck to the two main characteristics which are wide angles and green-blue colour blind.

There are another two points of view with no changes. One is the protagonist, who explained her version of the story. From there, the audience could reflect that maybe it was being sabotaged, maybe she was not a real culprit and suspects the other characters.

The other point of view is an overall view to watch the stories like a vigilance camera, watching all the reveals of many scenes.
As a personal anecdote, at my living place, we have a Chinese people community where we help each other. Any incident or rumours are rapidly spreaded, for example: whose house got robbed, who is in debt. Then their cases leave impressions in others’ minds. Thus the plot is set in a small rural village with a weak vigilance and public security. Having a small community, almost everyone knows each other, moreover the two of the characters are restaurant owners and another one is a policeman.

The newspaper is a medium to spread the news that impacts mainly on the characters’ reputation, for example, the dead mouse at the Amapola’s restaurant meaning bad hygiene at her place.
The style of the animation is 2D character cartoon animation with 3D backgrounds to make a bizarre look for the entire scene. It was challenging to mix two different dimensions since their styles are not conjugable aesthetically, however that difference brought an uncanny sense for the film which I really wanted to get.

The 2D and 3D animation mixing is inspired by a comedy cartoon series called The Amazing World of Gumball. The contrast of the real backgrounds and the cartoonish characters made me focus more on the characters’ actions without losing information about the locations. Furthermore, outside of the screen is real texture and volume as their backgrounds, thus the different style, saturated flat colours of the characters are eye-catching.

The character designs have huge differences in age and beauty to stand out the characters’ personalities. I did not introduce their profiles in depth since I was focusing on the script, thus their looks are one of the main properties to explain how they are.
For example, in the animation, the protagonist has a wrinkled skinny aged face plus her facial expression depicts her like a villainess, a creepy character at the first glance in the benniging.
In contrast, the antagonist (Ciruela) has smooth looks, curvy round lines that describe her as an innocent, a poor victim in the story. The quadratic shape of the policeman defines him as a serious, firm person fighting for justice but stubborn about the rules. Thus by judging at their appearance and their actions caused the lack of investigation and unhelped situations that the protagonist ended up in mainly.

Same with the voice over, I searched and acted different voices to fit the characters. The tone of voice, the feeling when they raised their voices were more descriptive than having me reading the script. I voiced the two female characters, one deep hoarse voice, one smooth and clean. The male character is casted by my friend Carlos Morales, his voice highlighted the policeman strong and firm.

To differentiate their way of speaking, for the protagonist, I muted many consonants that were intercalated and at the end which is one of the characteristics of Andalusian accent. Nevertheless, the other two characters are in Castilian Spanish to give them a formal and educated impression.

This project, for me, is defined by the amount of animal abuse cases. It aligns with my artistic goals by reflecting unseen, tragic cases. What’s in your pot is more than just an animation, it reflects mainly on the animal abuse but on the physical appearance as well. It represents my commitment to use animation as a medium to bring awareness to animal abuse."