What is the film about?

Meandering between dreamscapes, nightmares, childhood memories and their adult interpretations, the film brings a poem to life which revolves around the constantly transforming micro- and macro worlds of existence.

What influenced it?

The major influence was my hometown and a bunch of old diaries and childhood illustrations I found when I moved back there at the beginning of the pandemic. At the time I’ve read a lot from Sylvia Plath, Boris Vian and revisited Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – with the inky illustrations of John Tenniel. Besides him, another significant visual influence were the works of Marcell Jankovics, and three of his films: ​​Sisyphus, Son of the White Mare and an animated series called Hungarian Folk Tales.

A little background information...

The film was heavily inspired by the first wave of the pandemic, when I moved back to my hometown, a tiny village in South Hungary, far far away from my friends and Budapest which became my home during the years I’ve spent studying there.

While sorting out and decluttering everything I’ve sentimentally saved from the past (from concert tickets and ‘special’ chocolate papers to love letters – which I’ve never sent – and high school tests), I’ve found my old diaries and a big collection of illustrations from my childhood. By reading the writings of a past self and using my old drawing as a map, I’ve started to revisit the places where I grew up – both in the physical and ‘memorial’ sense. By gathering together the feelings and thoughts of the heavy nostalgia, the lurking depression and the pandemic-hopelessness created, I’ve written the poem which became the foundation of my film.

Password to the ***** captures my (since then) increasingly growing fascination with the parallel between the individual, psychological nature and the global , physical nature. This metaphorical parallel which Carl Jung also writes about seemed to be a really simple yet effective approach to point out: we are all part of a big, interconnected system. Hence ,by solving seemingly tiny, individual problems could lead us to the solution for issues on a larger, social scale.

The central message of the film which has been supported even by the frame by frame animation technique is the following: the only constant thing in the universe is the continuous transformation.

How was the film made?

I aimed to make a film which somehow has a physical existence as well. Due to the pandemic I’ve mostly connected with the world online, hence I craved the most screen-free production possible – therefore I decided to animate everything on paper.

I didn’t have a proper camera or Dragon Frame – after a few days of production my lighting table decided to die (R.I.P:) so I replaced it with a huge glass plate and the flash light of an old phone.

Although I’ve made reference footage for some of the scenes, however, for most of them – especially for the drone-like camera movements – I simply spent hours with closed eyes (while trying to not fall asleep) and ‘watched’ the desired camera movements again and again to be able to draw them accurately.

I used an iPhone 7, a small travel-tripod and a free Stop Motion mobile application to capture the created image sequences. It was definitely the most exciting part of the whole process because I could finally see how the individual frames which I’ve worked on for hours work together and create the magical animation itself. Despite the endless list of difficulties which animation filmmaking contains, I believe, this childlike fascination with the moment, when I see how a sequence of still images become ‘alive’, which brings me back over and over again to use this medium.