Claire Ross

Queen of the Night

Sofie only wants one thing - for her mama to be happy again. When she discovers that a flower in her mama’s garden is magical, she thinks she finally found a way to make it happen.

“Queen of the Night is a single channel 5 minute animated short, blending paper cutout stop-motion, charcoal animation, and 2D animation. The film follows a young girl, Sofie, as she tries to bridge the emotional gap between her mother and her recently late grandmother. It explores themes of grief and regret, breaking generational habits, and the complexities of daughterhood. The film was made through a combination of 2D animation techniques and stop-motion production. The puppets were designed and assembled with tape and string, allowing for movement. Ben Fieldhouse designed the layouts digitally, that I then traced the elements from and cut out of paper using a cricut machine. Some animated scenes, the paper flowers for example, were first animated in 2D, cut out on a cricut machine, then assembled again and shot for stop motion. The chalk animation was all done in 2D, then traced over with charcoal on physical paper and later inverted to be white. There was a lot of 2D animation planning, then rotoscoping with physical materials. The physicality of the film was very important. I looked to art therapy techniques of working with your hands as a way of processing hard feelings, to reflect the film’s main theme of grief. The physical elements of the final footage reflect this methodology, but the 2D references helped me figure out how to make the movements work for complicated scenes (like how petals change when a flower blooms), as I have more of a background with 2D animation. ”