Cliffhanger

Introduction

Cliffhanger is the first animated short that I ever directed, together with Jelle Janssen and Jasper Loos. It’s an ode to the beauty of film, where our protagonist Joe travels through different movie genre, not without risk. Cliffhanger was part of the Ultrakort program in 2020 and was shown in Dutch cinemas, as well as at a variety of national and international film festivals. In addition to co-directing, I also art directed, wrote and storyboarded the movie.

What genres?

In order to make a movie that will become an ode to film, genres need to be chosen, which have to be visually compelling and recognizable by the audience. And if you only get 2 minutes and 15 seconds for your story to be told, selecting them gets even harder. For this first rough pass of the storyboard, we chose the genres western, film noir, spy, fantasy, and apocalypse.

Slide 4 and 5 were storyboarded by storyboard artist Dominick van der Hoff.

Too much, too complex

We were granted a specific budget for this film, which eventually had to be created and more importantly, finished. We figured that this version of the storyboard was way too complex. Elaborated and detailed worlds, filled with a lot of different characters with too dynamic movements. And top of that, there were too many shots. Time to get back to the drawing table. We went from 5 to 4 genres and we altered them to western, horror, adventure and superhero. This time I also tried to reduce the complexity of the visual storytelling. Also, the villain that you may have noticed in the previous version, was eliminated. Instead, the antagonistic force of the story became the dangers of the genres.

Less is more

After this improved and, above all, less complex storyboard version, the visual foundation was laid for the film as it is today. However, even this storyboard could use some more simplification; shots were altered or even cut, and different ways of showing certain genres were explored. This to ensure the movie could actually be made within the time and budget. We ended up with a way simpler storyboard than before, but one that still worked very well for production.