What is the film about?

An intimate insight into the relationship between a mother and her child, in the midst of the most dangerous journey of their lives.

What influenced it?

I always go back to Richard Linklater’s ‘The Waking life’ because that is what got me into animation (Particularly rotoscoping). it showed me the possibilities of combining animation into live action and creating worlds around your characters that don’t exist in live action. I was also introduced to Joseph Pierce’s work by one of my animation instructors, and he is a brilliant animator who uses rotoscoping in the most absurd and creative ways.

My previous short film: ’The Sunshine Boy’, was also exploring a mother and son narrative but had a different message and social commentary. The timeline structure is very similar to the one in ‘The Magic Boat’. I use memories in the form of home footage to allow us into the world of these characters. I used VHS footage for ‘The Sunshine Boy’ and iPhone footage for ‘The Magic Boat’. This inspiration comes from my love for documentaries, but also from directors that use flashbacks in the form of short snippets as opposed to long scenes.

A little background information...

Stories from non-Western cultures, especially Arab cultures, are very rarely told by non-Western voices, leading to harmful stereotyping. This is something I’ve definitely noticed with a lot of documentaries and films about the issue. The refugee crisis has always been very close to my heart, as I have been exposed to it whilst living in Beirut since the conflict in Syria began. Seeing refugees dehumanized by the media, whether it’s right-wing media treating them like terrorists or left-wing media treating them like one-dimensional sob-stories, I felt that these people weren’t being shown as full-fledged humans who had lives similar to yours or mine before they became figures in a newspaper. So that is why I decided to make it and tell a story that shows Mama and Khaled’s journey from a humane perspective, where we get to see their lives before they embark on this journey.

How was the film made?

The film was first shot in live-action in Beirut. We shot the full film in three days and then I animated all of it from my bedroom. I gave myself 4 months (initially) to animate the entire film. However, drawing 12.5 frames per seconds and having certain elements not work out smoothly, delayed my process by another 3 months. I used adobe animate (flash) to do all of the rotoscoping and then I used after effects for all the compositing. Animating water and anything wet was definitely more complicated than I expected it to be. I ended up with 48 different versions of the sea. Throughout the making, I made sure to send scenes to friends and other animators to get their feedback and see if anything I was drawing was translating well. I was very worried about the lip-sync because it was my first time. So I made sure that I was testing my audio into my animated scenes through and through.

Overall the process was long, challenging but rewarding. I look forward to the next one.