FLEFF, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, recently held a series of contests around the theme “Open Space”. FLEFF promotes environmental causes and provided stock video and images for contestants to make a film about about open space, with an emphasis on the environment. Filmmakers were open to shoot extra footage and add their own content as well to their finished film. I luckily won the video contest.
I got the idea for Amoeba from watching a lot of astro physics videos (Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Micchiu!) about relativity, string theory, and how big the universe is. I thought: to the universe, we must be microscopic and insignificant, yet we imagine empty skies and distant dots as constellations to find the new world and stand in awe of a big, yet empty, open space. I then thought: As we're microscopic to the galaxies, what's microscopic to us, such as amoebas, must be in awe of the world we take for granted.
Closing animation done in Apple Motion with Adobe Illustrator. Footage and still pics provided by FLEFF, with the exception of the puddles,leaf, and the closing closeup of tree bark shots, which I filmed around Philadelphia.