“Aqua” by Gints Zilbalodis

Aqua is quite a sophisticated piece of visual storytelling for a 17 year-old. Created with Toon Boom Animate Pro, After Effects and Photoshop, this has been a passion project for teenager Gints Zilbalodis for the last year and a half. Says Zilbalodis:

“It started as vague ideas of a cat, ocean and overcoming fear. Then through numerous battles with the script it shaped up to something similar you can see now. After seven drafts I felt that it was ready to start storyboarding, but the film kept evolving all the way until the sound mix was done. I kept learning about filmmaking everyday, going through all of the different processes.

“I chose the cat as the main character mainly to save time with exposition, because people know that generally cats are afraid of water. So I could just jump right into action. Plus cat is a fairly small creature and the ocean seems even bigger to him. And of course cats are much easier to draw than humans.

“The film’s music is by my friend Bertrams Pauls PurviÅ¡Ä·is who helped a great deal to tell the story the way it was intended. Music had a lot of to convey in very little time and it came out much better than I could’ve ever expected”.