The storyboarding and character side of things! Read more in the 2D animation tab!
I’ve been working on this for a few years now, and it’s definitely the project closest to my heart! My mum is Maltese, and I’ve loved getting to explore that side of my heritage more with this project! Filomena u L-bir, or ‘Filomena and the Well’ in English, is a fable I created based around the folklore of Il’Belliegħa otherwise known as The Swallower – a fictional creature said to live in the wells of Malta and swallow up any child who dares to peer in. Apparently, they used to put eels into the wells to purify the water, back when Valetta was first being built, and so if you were brave enough to look in you’d perhaps see something moving beneath the water. Combined with the fact these wells were more just a hole in the ground, it makes sense that this terrifying creatures were thought up to scare away any children from potentially tumbling in.
Though, I may have ignored that last fact for the sack of dramatic effect.. please forgive me!
It’s not my specialism, but I’ve put a decent amount of work into the character design of this film. My goal was for every aspect to respect the Maltese Culture and Heritage I was wanting to explore and convey, while also putting my own spin on it all. And of course making it easy to animate!
The first version of the character that appears in the animatic shown here, is not actually the one I chose to go forward with. After doing a few animation tests that I have since lost to an unexpected computer crash, I realised that initial design was just impossible to animate, and that an immediate redesign was needed!
Also, my second pass of the storyboards included feet, so I was going to actually have to give her those.
This time around, I focused on creating a stronger shape language within the character to make her look more distinct, as well as to create a simple base shape that would make her much easier to animate. Squares are usually used to indicate a more grounded character, but I liked they way they made Filomena look distinct, and in some of these initial explorations they even serve to make her look a little petulant, which I think works well with how she will choose to ignore the advice of her mother as a key plot point within the story.
Forgive the repetition in the boards here, but I wasn’t satisfied with how I originally ended the storyboards, and so made a second pass at it, really researching into horror movie techniques used to build suspense and surprise in the video. Which is what led to the creation of everything past this note.
And we’re back to the original boards! My plan had been to always make sure that the audience never saw the full monster design, since their own imagination would likely be more terrifying than anything I could design – though I did still have a lot of fun designing said monster!
And regarding that, I liked my original plan to end the animatic still, so forgive the second bought of overlap!
