Production is moving along! Since our last update, we settled on a final title: La Frontière (The Border). I also traveled up to Québec to record all the voice work. A huge thanks goes to Diane Lamarre, who worked tirelessly to deliver a complex and emotional performance, as well as translate the script into French. Her attention to detail and nuance was simply magnifique. 

Meanwhile, we’ve finalized the character and art design of the film and are ready to share some early style frames. Credit goes to our art and animation director, Jen Sanchez, who developed the visual language of the film and the look of the main character, Joël, through many iterations. 

Thanks to Jen, I love how our little world is looking and I can’t wait for animation to begin. But first, we have a lot more artwork to produce. 

This shot offers a closer look at Joël’s companion in the film, Biscuit. After several versions, we fell in love with this bundle of jagged lines, which for us recalled the spiky oscillations of an audio waveform. When you see, and hear, La Frontière, I think you’ll understand the resemblance.

If you haven’t heard, we’re hard at work on a new animated short film that, for now, we’re calling “Frontière.” Why a French title? The film is set in a community in Quebec and Vermont that’s divided by the US-Canada border. You may have seen the village that inspired this setting in the news recently.  

The town has special significance for me, as my mother emigrated to Canada three years ago and now calls the Quebec side of the community home. I’ve spent a lot of time there, and the place and its people have come to feel like home to me, too. As my mom’s circle of welcoming friends has grown, so too has mine. 

That’s the real-life backstory, but the film’s narrative has taken on a life of it’s own. And it’s probably worth noting that our previous short film, Azúcar, was also set on a border, an in-between space.

I can’t give away too much now, but I will say that Frontière, which we plan to release in French and English, follows a man and a dog who find each other, and in so doing discover the borderlands between the past and a potential future. I hope that’s mysterious and intriguing enough. 

We’re deeply grateful for the support we have received from Executive Producer George Bard. Without him, we couldn’t tell this story.

Right now, the team is working on the storyboard; we estimate that the final board will have 300-400 panels. Once we have a first draft of it complete we’ll have a much better sense of the pacing and story flow, letting us map out the design and animation that lie ahead. At that point, we can begin making some decisions about adding or deleting shots, or perhaps entire scenes.

I took several trips up from Boston last winter to get a sense of the world of the film. I gathered shots of the town, the countryside around it, and my mom’s house. Mom kept me well fed and graciously joined me on the location scouts. She also made sure I had fuel for the way home — cans of maple syrup. 

We’ll have more updates soon…