Making The Lover's Coin

Animation is light, emotion, movement, and music. Creating a great animated story is about getting these four right in the correct measure.

The Lover's Coin is a five-minute animated folk tale in and a handcrafted stop-motion aesthetic.

At the center of film are two wishes. The Traveler wants to stop the pain of loss. The Witch wants to keep the one she loves. The coin holds a different meaning for each of them. I wanted to explore the point where devotion ossifies into pain and refusal, without making either person's longing easy to dismiss.

I am a texture freak. I love the tactile. Visually, I wanted a world that felt made by hand. Woven faces, frayed clothing, heather and serrated leaves in a miniature landscape, translucent linen skies, and subdued October light became a place. Imperfections were part of the film's emotional character.

I had never made a film in 9:16. I chose vertical framing to bring the film toward a social audience. An experiment for me. What I found was that the smaller viewing space locked you into the story, as the eye had less space to roam. The effect was a concentrated experience that surprised me.

The music was another deliberate choice. And it earned me my first bad review. (Thanks, honey!) I wanted contrast against the aesthetic, forward motion, curiosity, and openness before the weight of the story became apparent. A uniformly melancholy score would have told viewers how to feel before they understood the pain of the characters.

My musical choice at the start received strong pushback. Early viewers felt the music was off-putting and out of line for the story they were expecting. (The last part made me happy.) But in the spirit of openness, I tried alternatives and found that they produced a different film. A film I didn't want.

They did have questions about narrative clarity that I took to heart as the film is nearly wordless. The ritual's failure initially looked like more successful magic. I made the failed movement visible and gave the Traveler a response the Witch could register.

The brief image of her lover with open eyes could also suggest resurrection. Rethinking how to present that part of the story, as either memory or a liminal space after death, helped as well.

Working in this medium certainly exposes the distance between an attractive image and a meaningful action in storytelling. The tools produce movement, but you still have to decide whether that movement expresses grief, disappointment, recognition, or nothing at all.

There are more worlds coming. If you like this, get my next film in your inbox, along with glimpses of the characters and worlds taking shape.