In Song Sparrow the freezing temperature of a smuggler’s truck turns a group of refugees’ hopes for a better future into a struggle for survival.
Song Sparrow starts in an eerie forest, where a group of people are peering into the back of a meat truck with meat carcasses hanging from the roof. This is their ominous escape route. You can feel their nervousness in their blinking eyes and the cutting between the meat truck and their faces, alone in the forest. Their anxiety turns into excitement whilst they’re in the back of the truck as the refugees share blinking looks and dance to music. However, this changes when the truck’s refrigeration system kicks in.
It’s a short animated film that contains everything you want to see from a short animated film. Firstly, it gains true story points for basing the story on two tragic events (NBC News: 71 Refugees Found Dead in Truck in Austrian Highway, BBC News: Essex Lorry Deaths) that didn’t get the coverage they should have. Secondly, for its short film creds, it tells it’s story concisely and precisely whilst taking enough time to evoke sympathy for the characters involved. Lastly, for it’s animation creds, it’s uniquely animated with puppets with blinking eyes. They don’t say anything, but you can feel their anxiety, their relief, their excitement, and their despair in their blinking eyes. It’s proof that something so simple can be so effective.
However, creating the sets were not simple. To give you a better perspective on how they were made, and to prove how impressive it is visually, here’s a quick comment from the Director Farzaneh Omidvarnia and some images from the set:
“Firstly, the size of the puppets and sets are larger than they look (see the attached pictures); the Puppets are each around 70 cm tall. Secondly, it is a live action animation and I tried to animate and record the movements lively. The filming process took 80 days. I applied animatronics to develop the blinking eyes and eyeballs, and the eyes are controlled remotely. The movements are not conducted by stop motion. Nevertheless, I consider this a developing method that I am actually trying to exploit and advance it. In fact, it might be more challenging than for example stop-motion for some scenes, but I believe regarding the contents, it might convey the message and senses more clearly. So all my hope is that this technique gets established more strongly through my next movies.”
Farzaneh Omidvarnia
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