Pencils: 3D Animated Short

Introducing 'Pencils'! An animated short film created by 4 VFX & Animation students. The project was made for the Belgium organisation "Parents for inclusion", striving for more inclusion in education and society.

We were asked to find a way to visualize the term "Inclusion" as broadly as possible, this meant we had a lot of freedom to choose how we would tackle this challenge. 

Pencils can't talk or move all that much, so we told our story with a solid storyboard and a lot of animation work. But this wouldn't only be done visually, we had the amazing help of Tom Johnston, who is a composing student at the Conservatorium of Antwerp. He resonated with our project and helped us lift our story to the next level with a beautiful soundtrack.

We believe we achieved our goal, to visualize "Inclusion" in it's broadest term while telling a story.

Pencils are a great way to represent what inclusion means: they're diverse but also very recognisable to most viewers. We created 6 pencils with 6 different personalities, this meant they all had their own animation and drawing style. We kept our environment very simple so we could focus on these characters.

We gave these characters life by drawing with real life pencils in the same way they would move on the paper.

You can see some of our preparation in the Behind The Scenes video down below.