SUMMARY

"I've spent my entire professional career finding, discovering and then launching incredibly talented people into the entertainment business... I'm kind of stunned because I've never actually seen anything quite like this before.” — Anne-Marie Mackay

A feature length rotoscope animation.

Step into an animated character drama
through a new rotoscope technique
that brings actors into a
painterly world.

May, a traveling nurse, finds employment on an impossibly large hospital train, filled with patients and staff who all suffer from bad dreams.

"Powering steadily along the coast is a TRAIN extending far beyond sight, with its towering, five-storied carriages being swung side-to-side by the uneven rail; a city block on wheels."

May explores the passangers and staffs' differing relationships of home and journey; some grow where they are planted, others are dandelions.

HEAD NURSE
I think you'll find good company here. People like you.
(off May's look)
Travelers, you know — short term visitors. Like mayflies.

MAY
Hm.

The film uses Spatial Audio (32-speaker arrays) and Multi-Screen Theaters for an immersive experience.

Immersive showcase of The Month Between April and May in the Qualcomm Recombient Theatre.

Production Method: The feature was shot over 4 days using multi-cam setups and actors in full costume.

Animation Method: Every frame is painted over with a new rotoscope process, resulting in 7 minutes of animation treated per month.

100% Human Made: All animation and stylizations are done by hand. AI is not used for asset generation, image, video, or audio rendering, or any other creative process.

The Creators

The Team

Beyond traditional screens, the project is designed for Immersive Theatres and high-fidelity sound labs, and can be adapted for Dolby Atmos and other formats.

Theatrical showcase of The Month Between April and May in the Atkinson Theatre.

WHEN IT STARTED

Director's Thoughts

I grew up in Japan where Ghibli was king. The studio's drawings were everywhere -- on buses and trains, or anywhere with a mass transit of people. My family left the island when I was ten, and I eventually went into animation in the States.

Myles and I met on a film set; I was doing sound work at the time and he was the composer. The director asked for my opinion on a few musicians, and I told her that Myles was the only option. We talked for hours after the set wrapped. Five years later, we're making a film together.

We're both from islands -- his family is Puerto Rican and I'm from Okinawa. We share a love for ambient music and of slowly listening to an album; an “island time” mentality, in a way. That's where we started with this project.

During the writing of this film I became an itinerant. Somehow, a two week ticket to Paris turned into a year and a half of travel. Throughout, Myles and I would call and talk about the story.

Shortly after my travels, my Japanese grandfather died. A few days later, my English grandfather died. With two funerals to attend I had to extend my travel, again. On the road, I read a collection of short stories by my grandfather's favorite author, Somerset Maugham. That night, recovering in my cousin's tiny bunk bed, I had a dream of a train circling an island forever, and The Month Between April and May was born.

The script was written entirely on my phone. I wrote in every place I visited, and in the planes and trains I took to get there.

One of the most notable qualities of a Miyazaki film is a reverence for time, and as a result, a lot of time is spent showing characters in transit. There's a lot to learn about how a person spends their time in enroute. Everyone travels, in some way, every day.

While there are a lot of novelties explored in both the creative and the production of this film, the essence of it is, I hope, universal: wander.

- Kai

WHAT IS IT?

If you like theatre and Studio Ghibli...

Rotoscope animation is the middle ground between performance and animation. The people who love either are bound to enjoy both.

The story follows a hospital train, The Dreamcatcher Express -- “a city on wheels,” circling an island indefinitely. The patients and staff are oblivious to this; patients suffer from their afflictions, and the doctors treat them through a surreal form of dream therapy.

May is a traveling nurse. She's been blown from place to place the last few years, and having recently been transferred from a hospital ship, she's grateful to have employment on solid ground -- as solid as a train can be. Then, she meets Thomas.

He wears a blue shirt, open at the neck, and gray canvas trousers, not as though they belonged to him but as though he was shipwrecked in his pajamas, and had been fitted out with odd garments by compassionate strangers.

Knock, knock, knock. Someone's at the door.

May and Thomas get along instantly. They discover that they attended the same high school and cherish common ground. Thomas talks of his journey around the world that led to his admission as a patient on the train; he talks about his dream of chasing an island paradise. May listens. Then, that night, Thomas jumps off the train.

We chose this scene to be our proof of concept.

Still from The Month Between April and May proof of concept.

The production ran like theatre — actors in costume ran through scenes uninterrupted with a multi-cam setup. This allowed us to shoot the full film in four days.

"Rotoscope animation in its true form takes an unbelievable amount of time... I think I've just figured out how to cheat a lot.

Every shot that you see was shot through a mirror... you get an effect like that, which is a bit ethereal, a bit shimmering and a bit like a watercolor.” — Kai Tattersall

A previous project, Heaven, won the AI International Film Festival in 2022, but in response to the direction machine learning has taken, we've vowed to restrict AI to preprocessing data. Its use is limited to material extraction and matte extraction. All animation and stylizations are done by people. AI is not used for asset generation, image, video, or audio rendering, or any other creative process.

This method of animation wouldn't have been possible a few years ago, but there's no substitute for just going frame by frame and painting what you can. At the end of the day, the costume and physical props were the foundations for the rotoscoping.

WHO WE ARE

Composer's Thoughts

One day, digging around my parents garage, I found two books that were read to me as a kid: “La Isla” and “The Secret Footprints”. I'd completely forgotten about them, but the more pages I turned the more memories came back; ripped and worn pages, the precious fragile colors and images that seemed to be drawn in with crayon, smudges where my mom licked her fingers to turn the page…

Images from "The Secret Footprints" (left) and "La Isla" (right). Illustrations by Fabian Negrin and Elisa Kleven.

I'd been back to Puerto Rico more than a few times, but now these books somehow seemed more real than the island itself. Kai and I had already been discussing a mutual fascination in exploring our estranged relationship with our cultural heritage, and what better way to do that than interpreting the children's books that were the literal vessels of preservation for the new generations living off the island… These books went on to become the basis of how we stylized this film.

My exposure to immersive technologies in my PhD program has given my film composer brain a renewed excitement in translating images and colors to sound, and the trust that Kai and I have built in each other has allowed him to build image and color from my sound. Subtly, I find myself trying to rebuild the very special experience of hearing “La Isla” while sitting on my moms lap as a kid. She reads to me, and my imagination is transported to an island very far away.

- Myles

WHERE IT'S GOING

Myles, Kai, and Anne-Marie

We will complete the film by February 2027 in order to make the next season of film festivals, with plans to submit to Cannes, Venice, Sundance, and Annecy

Due to the intersection of disciplines rotoscope offers, we're looking to partner with organizations in both theatre and animation.

In addition, the film is supported by state of the art spatial audio setups (32-speaker arrays) and immersive theatres (wrap around video). Expanding on our collaboration with Meyers and Qualcomm, we're looking to further partner with organizations looking to showcase immersive technology.

Currently we are in post production. The film is slated to be 70 minutes.

WHY THIS?

READ THE SCRIPT

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WATCH THE EVENT RECORDING

Cutdown

Full Recording

GET INVOLVED

Email production@2000blue.com to get involved.