On this page, you'll find a brief overview of how my graduation project "Ursa Minor" came to be.
On the right, you can watch the trailer and get an idea of what "Ursa Minor" is like. The entire film won't be published online before its festival run is over, but the film can occasionally be seen on said festivals. If you cannot attend any, feel free to contact me for a private link.
The first building blocks to Ursa Minor were these elements: a young girl, a bear and some sort of journey.
With these little bits in mind, I started sketching, thinking and writing. On the left, you can see the very first sketchbook drawings I made for the film.
As I worked out the visual style through sketches, tests and background ideas, I also started to get a grasp of the story.
Inspired by artists like Tove Jansson and John Bauer, I discovered new elements to the film, like the theme of growing up, the sense of vastness that I wanted the world to have, and the element of magic and strangeness.
A lot of time went into working through these themes, finding out what they meant to me and how they fit in the story.
One of the ways theme of magic found its way into the film is through an idea I stumbled upon while cycling to a covid test (the world works in mysterious ways): next to a bus stop sat an old roman altar.
This led me to the little house-shaped things that play a big part in the story, and it shows something I love about making art. Inspiration comes from everywhere.
Much of the time I spent on the film had to do with the story, both its structure and its meaning.
Although I found the theme of growing up, I had yet to find the meaning of it within the film. To this end, I interviewed my family and good friends on the subject, and set to writing. I pondered these conversations, and took out the themes and lessons I thought most important to my film.
The rest of the process consisted mostly of nailing down the specifics of the story and getting it structured in a way that made sense. This meant a lot of storyboarding: one on three giant pieces of paper, one with a big heap of post-its and one more polished version in photoshop.
All that was left to do after finishing the final storyboard was the actual production of the film!
In the last couple images of this mini-making-of, you can see some stills from the final film.
