From Dad To Son

Coming from Germany, this short film by Nils Knoblich and Stephan Hanf uses a stylized black and white aesthetic, and is animated using characters made out of paper. Producing the short involved cutting hundreds of paper sheets.

The subject of the film deals with family ties and the director used a number of elements to help transmit emotion, including close-ups to show the characters’ faces (and tears), music to set the mood and sound emitted by the characters. Cameras are mostly static, with visual rhythm provided through editing and movement within the frame (with a few exceptions, such as the zoom in 2m52 to emphasize a guard’s expression).

The paper technique is quite visible in the film, which adds a nice feeling of roughness to the aesthetic.