What is the film about?

Flipped explores the absurdity of a world where the roles of kids and adults are switched. The story follows a day full of bizarrely reversed interactions, unravelling the dynamics of this relationship and how the characters adapt in such a world.

A little background information...

“What if kids and adults switched roles?” This was the spark that got us into the process of making this film. We both got drawn to this idea as we realised that the roles inevitably change in real life. Both of our sisters gave birth around that time so we both experienced being aunts for the first time, and got to reflect about the nature of the relationship between children and parents. Although the main idea can be a bit poignant, we realised we can still be playful with the situations that can take place in that world, and this is what got us excited to develop it further.

How was the film made?

Story: 

We started out by sketching different situations and ended up with many thumbnails that we filtered and built on throughout the whole process. Our story process was a bit unconventional since we were not following a main character, it rather felt like a puzzle of different situations that we kept re-organising to form the whole. “One day” timeline was the only rule we set for the story, a simple solution we adopted to link the different characters of this world.

Image courtesy of Hend & Lamiaa

Visual:

We wanted to create a style that complements the idea of the film, combining a mixture of neat graphical lines with analog textures and childlike drawing. 

Image courtesy of Hend & Lamiaa

Technical:

It took us several trials to reach a workflow that matched our technical abilities with the analog visual style we wanted to achieve. We used the wonderful tool Duik for the character rigging, which worked perfectly with the combination of hollow strokes and filled shapes.

In order to have more control over the movements, we animated using “Hold Frames” in After Effects (Ae), with a combination of interpolated key frames. This allowed us to tweak each pose the way we wanted, rather than rely on the software to do all the in-betweens. We also made frame by frame references for complex movements in order not to get lost in Ae with technical issues.

Image courtesy of Hend & Lamiaa

To make the animation more dynamic, we added some frame by frame elements on TV Paint and composited everything later on Ae. So the result was a combination of digital and frame by frame animation.

For more about the making of the film visit hendandlamiaa.com