Dec 1, 2024

2025 Oscar Short Film Candidates: -Tennis, Orange director Sean Peck Nord

Cartoon Brew is putting the spotlight on an animated short film nominated for an Academy Award in 2025.

This article looks at American film director Sean Peck Nord's tennis, Orange. The short was awarded an Academy Award by winning the Short Jury Award at the New Hampshire Film Festival.

As a robot vacuum in a pandemic hospital ceases its repetitive work, Tennis, Orange follows this distinctive protagonist when traveling to Chinatown looking for meaning. There, Vacuum makes friends with a rabbit trapped in his own repetition. Through this accidental encounter, our robot character goes beyond his programmed cleaning routine in a short of this moving stop-motion

Cartoon brewing: Why did you choose a rabbit to draw a very humane character in the story-

Sean Pecknold: I always wanted to draw a rabbit, but I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to draw a rabbit, and I always wanted to Anthropomorphic Stories Watership Down was one of my favorite books of childhood, as well as the Red Wall, the Bettille Rabbit, The Wind of the Willow, Roald Dahl, The Narnia Story, etc. When my imagination was being formed, I think I was attracted to the type of story that didn't make a big difference between human characters, animal characters, or spirit characters. For me, it allows the expansion of reality so that viewers can experience emotions in new ways and not be too distracted by human details and idiosyncrasies.

In cg and stop motion, I think there are inevitable "mysterious valleys" where the design of human characters feels close, but not close enough. With anthropomorphic animals, it is not always necessary to fight with their reality.This also simplifies and focuses on something that was a little more forgiving, while still giving us enough expressive details so you care about them

In fact, in the original script, the robot vacuum character was a full-fledged anthropomorphic rabbit nurse who worked in the hospital, but it was too much. It felt real and too high, so I decided to simplify it to a vacuum. This has made the process of animation easier, but I also think that while evoking emotional attachment, using abstractions that I wanted to see how simple the main characters are, or putting human emotions in a new context, can convey universal ideas. This approach gives the audience the opportunity to connect with the theme of the film in a fresh way.

What was forced to connect with you and direct a film about this story or concept-

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I rather evacuated and felt alone. Flash Forward 1 year, I realized that what I lacked in my life was a space to try to make movies and build a community. So I rented an old art gallery on Zhongwang Road in Chinatown. And I persuaded Adi Goodrich, my wife and tennis's final production designer, Orange, to join me there. We formed a creative studio Sing-Sing and worked there for four years most of the time and day and slowly met more people on the street.

In 2019, we left the studio and said goodbye to our friends on the street. The street stayed with us and the idea of creating animated short films there continued to grow in our minds. Throughout the year of the 2020 pandemic, there was an overwhelming sense of sudden and massive losses. The script and storyboard were already finished, but I wanted to make a film in search of friendship, but it showed a sense of liberation and satisfaction to those who were approaching the last moment. I have also recently made several music films that use choreography to tell stories, and I wanted to expand that approach to animation that tells stories only through movement, sound and music. The pandemic has faded, but we are now in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness, and people feel more disconnected than ever. So this has become something I want to explore more deeply.

What did you learn about productive, cinematic, creative, or subject matter through the experience of making this film-

You've learned to trust your original urge to make something, even if you feel it's impossible. If you have a vision for something and you really have to make it, you will figure out how to make it, whether you have a million dollars or 10 dollars. This can take 6 months, 3 years, or 10 years. But the important thing is to keep moving forward, always keeping in mind why you wanted to start and make things in the first place.

Our small studio (which mostly works with me and Adi frequently) has learned that it can create high-quality works on a very independent scale. There is quite a lack of funding for animated short stories in America, so I self-produced it and did some of the animation, lighting, cinematography, and all the posts, which took a lot of time, but it helped keep costs down and also keep the workflow down and fast. Next time we are very specific about how we were spending a little money we had and making sure that what we spent was over on screen, I will definitely try not to do all of the rig removal myself.

Making a film has been a difficult journey, but we are proud to learn lessons along the way, adapt as needed, bring in new collaborators to make it exciting and finally complete the film we were proud of. It's comforting to know that the independent film and animation community will continue to make movies, regardless of their budget. In doing so, we can show you that you can make something special with less.

Can you explain how you developed a visual approach to cinema - why did you settle for this style/technique-

I've worked with every style of stop-motion, from pixilation to clayisation to multi-plane glass with paper puppets, but I've always wanted to make a proper 3d puppet stop-motion film. What makes stop motion special is that it has a timeless quality that I believe connects with viewers in a different way.

As for the visual appearance of the film, Addy and I had spent so much time walking down Chung King Road and soaking up visual inspiration there, we had a lot to be inspired. ADI developed a palette of other colors, some inspired by real life, from old photographs from the 1970s, so that they became more detailed about how to transform real・life inspiration into miniature forms, how colors look, and how architecture takes shape. We are always trying to find a balance between warm and cool colors and find harmony when those tones support each other.

For the look of the film photos, I wanted to create a stop-motion look that felt more like live action. Sometimes stop motion can deliberately catch your eye on the fact that everything is small, but I think this world is as big as our own, so I developed the look of framing, lighting and depth of field, pushing it more towards a sense of scale in live action.