Billy & Death

This animated short film is about Death and rebirth. I created this as an exercise in storyboarding and pre-visualization while studying screenwriting at Dalarna University in 2009. The assignment was to create a moving storyboard and I may have gone a little overboard in practically making it an animated short. It's one of the first bigger animation projects I tackled and it gave me a hunger to do more.

I believe the original assignment was to write a short script without dialogue where someone leaves something somewhere, and then someone else picks it up. Given this fairly open-ended task I created a no-doubt Terry Pratchett-inspired handover of the Grim Reaper duties from the old generation to the new.

If there's one thing I'd go back and change it's concerning the Grim Reaper's list. It's supposed to be clear that he's reached the end of his list, and that this tree is the very last thing he has to reap, meaning that he's then allowed to move on. While visible in the short, this isn't entirely clear, and it's fairly important as it sets up the whole concept of Grim Reaping being a limited term thing that is handed over to the next person to wander by. All in all though, I'm very happy with this short! Below you'll find some of the storyboards I created ahead of this project.

Video published October, 2009