I came to film from photography. Stop-motion felt like the natural bridge. Zolo was my first attempt at pushing photography into a new medium: film.
U is a young musician who loves to play but is terrified of the stage a single traumatic performance has left him doubting his own hands.
His friend K gives up his own seat and coaxes him back to the keyboard. As U finally plays, the small room swells into a roaring concert and he becomes the musician P he always idolised. The story is a quiet portrait of stage fear, and of the friend who stays until the last step of the stage.
Sparked by my own nerves, and by the stage-fright stories of artists like Barbra Streisand and Katy Perry.
Foam board, mountboard, wood and cloth were used for the character, props and sets. The same body plays three ages of the musician by swapping heads between scenes.
Two miniature worlds a cramped room and an open stage built at tabletop scale so the camera could live inside them, frame by frame.
Lighting tests found a single beam that pulls ZOLO from darkness onto the stage. The light shifts with emotion: angle and intensity change to reveal the character's emotional state at each age.
Hundreds of stills, one second at a time.
