Burr is a curious little creature who loves to cling onto anyone it can get close to, however due to its nature as a burr, it is torn away and rejected by all it comes in contact with. In the end will it manage to find another it can bond to?
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Burr was created as my final Thesis film at the Sheridan Animation Program in 2021. I had some fun screening it at a few film festivals, and now that that’s over I’ve decided to finally upload and to premiere it on Newgrounds before anywhere else.
For this film I wanted to try something different from what I normally do and experimented with realistic looking assets, both digitally painted and taken from photographs. I wanted it to also look simplistic in execution, taking reference from paper cut out animations rather than hand drawn. As for the story and characters, I wanted to make the type of world that could be found in a child’s imagination.
The overall idea came from a trait I had as a child to take inanimate objects and pretend they were living characters. I would take pens, pencils, erasers, and rulers out of my desk, and play out imaginary adventures with them. I realized that years later, that was pretty much what I did as an animator and wanted to pay homage to it. While thinking of an idea for the film, I found Burr plants all around my college and decided to use the same concept of imagining what it would do if it was a living creature.
(I also enjoyed getting them stuck on me running through fields as a kid and wanted to revisit that childhood memory)
Originally the story focused on a variety of imaginary creatures found in nature and created from a child’s imagination, from Acorn Rats to living Maple tree Spinners, but in order to narrow the scope of the story, Burr became the primary focus. It would be cool to come back and explore more of this world sometime in the future.
Special thanks to @rcampbellmusic for composing the soundtrack for me. Could not have done it without them.
Check them out: https://www.instagram.com/rcampbellmusic