This Project is done in collaboration with Niek Hendrik. To view his portfolio, copy the link below:
https://niekhendrik.nl/
Mind the Gap is a 2D animated short film, about a boy travelling with public transport from the city where he studies to the city where he lives. The boy is highly sensitive to his surroundings and also extremely empathic. Every means of transport Luke takes is linked to an emotion. He uses a magical stress ball to filter these emotions. However, the moment the stress ball’s capacity has reached its limit, Luke is forced to come into contact with his more objective other half and is encouraged to tame his overly empathic monster.
We live in a world that’s constantly evolving and changing, becoming more complex, crowded and chaotic as time moves on. The world of today tells us to be “pleasantly” stimulated by big crowds, flashing lights and loud noises. This can be very overwhelming and challenging, especially for highly sensitive people. By telling the story of a highly sensitive boy, who learns how to deal with the chaos and complexity of the world and the people around him, we hope to teach our audience a lesson about how to remain true to yourself. We want our film to help people realise it’s normal to feel overwhelmed from time to time, and the importance of recognizing negative emotions instead of trying to suppress them.
Fun fact: During the Talent days of the Dutch Film Festival, the following question was asked towards the audience: "How many of you recognized yourself in this film?" Around 25 percent of the room raised their hand.
Trailer
Storyboard (without sounds):
The whole storyboard was made by me
Character Line-up
All characters are designed by Niek Hendrik
Relation to the subject
First of all, the main topics of our film are high sensitivity and overwhelming empathy. I (Mireille) personally have found out a year ago that I am a high sensitive person. I wanted to learn more about the topic, since it was very unknown to me, but I was also interested to talk to people in my surroundings about it. It turned out that a lot of people are highly sensitive. According to the book, High Sensitive People written by psychotherapist Elain Aron, 15 to 20 percent of the population is highly sensitive.
When talking to other people about it I noticed that some people are still really struggling with it, whereas others had clearly found their ways to deal with overstimulation and overwhelming empathy. During the making of the storyboard, we tested our film with small audiences, including the people we spoke to for our research. They have helped this project tremendously to talk about the way overstimulation makes them feel and the way they sometimes try to suppress it. The conversations we had even helped some people to gather new insights and to see their high sensitive trait in a different and more positive light. We hope, with our symbolic film, to open up a conversation about high sensitivity and overwhelming empathy.
Secondly, in our film we wanted to represent the multicultural society. Since we also had to represent people from a different ethnicity as ours, we went into conversation with POC filmmakers such as, Robert-Jonathan Koeyers and Delano Westenburg.
STILLS and concepts
All Characters are drawn by Niek Hendrik.
