Endling

Kelly Yu's film is shot as a documentary: a crew, a man, an aquarium, the last goldfish on Earth. Roughly a minute of it is something else entirely — the old story of the carp that swims upriver, leaps the Dragon Gate, and is turned into a dragon. In this telling the carp makes the leap and comes through the other side as a goldfish.

That minute had to work as a piece of folklore for an audience that had likely never heard it, land inside a live-action film without feeling bolted on, and be finished in twenty days by a department of ten spread across several time zones. The animatic locked on 12 April 2024. Everything shipped on 2 May.

Before anything moved, the director had to see what the film would look like. Several artists pitched directions; two of them were mine. One flat and graphic, drawn in saturated pastels with the eyes doing all the acting. One painted, warm, soft-edged, with pupils too big for the head.

Each was then tested against four different grounds — plain, halftone, deep navy, gold line on black, white plaster, turquoise water — because on a schedule this short the background is not a later decision. It is the thing that decides whether a character can be drawn quickly, by several hands, and still read at speed. A design that only works on white is not finished.

The film went with the painted one.

A design is not finished when it looks good in one drawing. On a frame-by-frame production it is finished when someone who has never seen it can reproduce it at three in the morning and have it match. Ours was going through three inbetween artists, a key animator, a colourist and two more animators.

So the model sheet is not a beauty pass. It is a set of rules. Dorsal fin: three lines. Tail: three lines. The mouth in profile is a heart plus a curve; head-on it is a slime shape plus a curve. The eye is exactly three parts — white, black dot, highlight. The body is an oval from the side and a rounder oval from the front. The eyes bulge, but only to the edge of the head, never past it.

Written that way, the character stops being a drawing and becomes something closer to a specification. That is what let the department work in parallel and still cut together.

The passage of time is the hardest thing to animate cheaply, because the obvious version is a montage and a montage costs shots. Instead the sequence holds one composition and repaints it. The mountain, the falls and the framing never change. Blossom arrives, then summer green, then rain, then snow — and the same single carp is at the bottom of the falls in every one of them, still trying.

Nothing in that shot is a camera move or an effect. It is four paintings of one drawing, dissolved. A year of story for the price of a background, which on a twenty-day schedule is the whole argument.

Twenty days for a minute of frame-by-frame animation only works if you draw fewer frames. We worked at eight drawings per second and output at 24, which is a normal trade and mostly invisible.

Mostly. When the director saw the assembly she flagged two things that felt rough, and she was right about both: moving water, and any shot where the camera itself moved. Those are exactly the two cases where the eye tracks a continuous path and can feel the missing frames.

The fix was not to redraw the film. It was to spend frames only where they were being missed. I re-rendered the water at 24fps and composited it back over the 8fps animation, added motion blur — the editor's suggestion, and it did more than expected — and went back through the sequence to find every shot with camera movement. There were four. Those went to 12fps. Everything else stayed on eights.

The shot the whole minute exists for is about one second long: the fish comes out of the cloud above the gate, and it is no longer a carp. In the first assembly nobody could see the change happen — the goldfish simply appeared. Worse, the director's note on it was blunt and accurate: it looked like a bird flying.

Three changes fixed it, and none of them were a bigger effect. First, a frame-by-frame morph, drawn and coloured rather than dissolved, so the body genuinely changes shape and colour on screen; I specified it and Angélica Maia Machado Rocha animated it. Second, we stopped animating the fins. A fish flapping through air reads as a bird; a fish holding perfectly still reads as a fish that has been fired out of something. Third, speed lines through the cloud, to say the same thing again in a different language.

The same logic cleaned up a smaller problem earlier in the sequence. Carp leaping at the falls were vanishing mid-jump instead of landing anywhere, so I added a splash at the point of contact. A fish that disappears is a bug. A fish that disappears into water is a fish that went into the waterfall.

Delivered on schedule as ProRes 444 on 2 May 2024. The film premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June, then played HollyShorts, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and NFFTY, where it was a jury nominee. It is Oscar-qualifying.

It is the odd one out on this site — a screen, not a room, and a story told to an audience sitting still. It is here because the work underneath is the same work: give a character rules clear enough that other people can carry it, decide where the expensive frames go, and make sure the thing you built can be read by someone who was given no instructions at all.