Film stills
‘Voicemail’ is a frame-by-frame animation drawn in graphite pencil/conte crayon and explores my memory of my father’s death in 2023. The audio combines his voice with field recordings from the South West coast path, which is where I was walking at the time I heard the news.
Watch the film trailer here.
Screenings
Festival of Animation Berlin (FAB) – Official Selection
Vermont Animation Festival 2025 – Official Selection
Folkestone Film Festival 2025 – Award Winner
Sea Change Film Festival 2025 – Official Selection
Society for Animation Studies 2025 Conference – accepted for presentation
Process – original drawings and model
I began by recording footage of the undercliffs and rock pools along Axmouth beach (Devon, England) and collecting field recordings of the Jurassic coast path. I then selected the footage to be rotoscoped and, after cropping/altering the composition, printed out the frames onto A3 paper. Once the frames were drawn over, the finished drawings were scanned back onto my laptop and arranged into the final animation.
The use of rotoscope in Voicemail permitted me to draw from my own field perspective but also switch to the imagined field perspectives of others in my family. In the drawings I can see a merging of different characters and viewpoints, which was the approach I took when drawing: sometimes I was drawing from my perspective, sometimes drawing from the imagined perspective of my father.
Rotoscoping also allowed me to bring in model making/stop motion animation into the project without completely changing the tone of the film. After constructing a face with canvas and painting it to resemble seaweed, manipulating its mouth movements and taking photographs to form an animated sequence, I printed out the frames and drew over my stop motion footage. By redrawing the sequence, I condensed the detail of the stop motion footage so as not to interrupt the tone created by the previous pencil-drawn sequences.
Holly Rivers Aguirre 