make an animated short that felt like Hedgehog in the Fog. I didn’t want to copy Yuri Norstein’s film, so we went with a new story.
It runs for 6.5 minutes. All 9363 frames are drawn by JavaScript code written by Opus. No video or image generation models, just canvas.
It follows a little mouse in a red scarf. Her grandfather, an old mole, is out fishing when fog rolls over the lake. She goes looking for him with a walnut-shell lantern and a sleeping firefly inside. They have a secret knock to help them find each other: short, short, long. It means "I’m here".
Norstein used paper cutouts on layers of glass, filmed frame by frame. I wanted some of that paper texture to come through in code. So the scenes use different styles: torn-paper collage, chalk on black paper, tissue paper underwater. There’s even sand on a light table and a pop-up book.
Opus wrote the music too. It found Steinway piano samples in my Logic library and used Python to compose the score around the rhythm of that knock.
