Wild Woman

3 min 45 seconds

Wild Woman is an animated poem to mankind which invokes current world issues such as drone-strikes and religious persecution in a plea for empathy. Scenes transform and melt as the animator also explores her personal struggle of becoming a mother and identifying as such in our current social and political climate

Director, 2D Animator, Compositor: Vanessa Sweet

Assistant Art Direction: Nic Sweet

Sound Designer: Invictus Sound Factory

Director’s Statement:

Wild Woman began as a concept where I was truly hoping to get in touch with the deeper, feminine aspects of myself. I wanted to embody femme through my drawings. What began as sensuality transformed into maternity, along with my own life path. Shortly after I had started the initial version of this film, I became pregnant with my first child. I was terrified; a wholly new adventure that I had no experience in. I struggled to complete the film, and by 2013 I was an exhausted new mother feeling all the pressures of societal perception, struggling to maintain my own identity and “perform” efficiently as a creative. It went back on the shelf. I stopped drawing, writing, or creating for two years. I drowned in my own failed expectations of myself.

Over time I began paying more attention to the greater scope and scale of the global proceedings around me, and how dispassionate displays of destruction left no regard for the communities they disrupted. I held my child, and thought of other mothers, doing the same. Eventually, overwhelmed but burning from lack of creative outlet, I sat down and began by stumbling back to my beginning: writing poetry. It was then I rediscovered myself, and how poetry, prose, and writing act as a grounding element for me. After drafting and re-drafting this poem, I had in my hands something that petrified me; my voice. Hitherto that moment, I realized I had never been that vulnerable in my work. It was exhilarating and full of uncertainty. Apt, for a new mother.

This film and poem embody a plea for empathy and compassion. It results from my encounters with misogyny, oppression, repression, the agoraphobic and the xenophobic in this world. It is a battle cry against all the hatred. The purity of new life, the change and evolutions I was experiencing in myself, mind and body, are all infused in each transforming frame and every verse. It could only be described as a metamorphosis. So, it was with that mindset I took to breaking down the elements of the poetry to form an interwoven, flowing connection of visuals, mimicking the poem itself. The softness that watercolor offers, and its looseness seemed ideal for embodying the morphing nature of the frames, but was exceedingly labor and time intensive. By utilizing both traditional water colors and inks, as well as digital drawing software, I was able to create a hybrid film to embrace both speed and tactility of visuals. Those tangible, real elements are vital to my process. They help inform the line, and embrace the imperfections the hand can bring.