Sanjana Sarah Paul

may 2024

mixed media animation

europe trip 2024

A mixed media animation blending hand-drawn digital frames with real footage from my travels across the UK and Switzerland. This project is a quiet reflection on fleeting beauty, memory, and the act of seeing.

Concept

This film explores the disconnect between experiencing a place and documenting it. Shot on location in the UK and Switzerland, the footage captures landscapes and moments that are inherently overwhelming in their stillness and scale. The frame-by-frame animation is layered onto these clips not to explain or interpret them, but to respond. Sometimes playful, sometimes introspective, the animated gestures serve as a visual echo, emphasising that what the camera sees is just a fraction of what one feels.

process

The project began during my travels through the UK and Switzerland, where I captured footage with the intent to document mood over monument, like the quiet corners, shifting skies, soft light, and the slow pace of stillness. Each clip was chosen for its texture and emotional tone, aiming to reflect the serenity and vastness that, even through a lens, could only convey a fraction of what was felt in person.

The project began during my travels through the UK and Switzerland, where I documented glimpses of scenery, architecture, and atmosphere to capture not tourist sites, but mood with quiet corners, light filtering through trees and distant mountain silhouettes. Each frame of footage was selected for its visual texture and emotional resonance, forming a slow, observational base.

Back in Delhi, I treated the footage as a canvas—layering hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animation created in Procreate. This was a purely experimental process, led by intuition rather than planning.

The result is a dialogue between what the camera records and what memory holds—between the captured and the imagined. The experimental animation becomes a soft, second layer of perception—suggesting the emotional imprint left behind when the moment has passed.