A Cloud Holding a Knife

General Project Details

Overview

A Cloud Holding A Knife is a comedic short film directed by Julian Iliev that was released onto the film festival circuit in 2024. Most of the visuals were created by my team, which consisted of three members, including myself. The film follows “[a] young blind adult is having a hard time sustaining a relationship because all his girlfriends die” (FilmFreeway, 2024, Overview). Of its approximately 9-minute runtime, our team produced a little over 6 minutes total, with me being responsible for animating 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Aside from animation, I was also heavily involved in the layout and composition of these shots as the storyboard artist for this team.

The team’s involvement in this project stemmed from our work on a previous project, the "Postcard Home From English Bay" poetry video, where the director scouted us after observing our work as a teaching assistant for that course. As such, most of the pre-production planning and production pipeline follow a very similar process used in that project. As this film is still in the festival circuit, there is not much I can disclose regarding specifics of the production.

Screenings

• Nomination - 2024 Rand Film Festival, Hessia, Germany
• 2024 Tokyo International Short Film Festival, Japan
• 2024 Trenton Film Festival, Trenton, NJ, USA
• ​2024 Tigertail Asian Film Festival, Tampa, FL, USA
• 2024 Wasteland Film Festival, CA, USA
• 2024 Festival Carton, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 2024 BFX Festival, Poole, United Kingdom
• 2024 TOFUZI International Animated Film Festival, Tbilisi, Georgia
• 2024 Napier Student Film Festival, Scotland
• 2024 Roma Film Corto, Italy
• 2025 Barbados Independent Film Festival, Bridgetown, Barbados
• Finalist - 2024 MicroFAF – Belgrade, Serbia
• 2025 Green Bay Film Festival, Wisconsin, USA
• 2025 31st IFSAK Short Film Festival – Istanbul, Turkey
• 2025 35th LA Comedy Film Festival, CA, USA

Reflection

This project was valuable in that it made me acutely aware of the importance of organization and having pipelines in place for data transfer. As the film is in a collage style, many elements that were used were transformed from images that did not originate from us. While this was similar to the case with the “Postcard Home From English Bay” Poetry Video, we were more paranoid about potential copyright issues as this was neither an educational nor non-profit project like the way the poetry video was. All elements were taken from explicitly public domain or from a places where one member already had access to commercial licenses to the images, and all sources were documented extensively. The coordination required to keep this record and share the resources so that nothing others did not need to find other similar images was both hectic and an important experience.

Additionally I learned more about video codecs used during production, as that was a mistake that previously impacted the final quality of that video. With “Postcard Home from English Bay” the team were exporting individual shots to the MPEG-4 file in an H.264 format which is a compressed format that resulted in the final video having a lot of unwanted distorted artifacts from the repeated compression during production. For this film, the final shots used for the film were all exported to MOV format with the Apple Prores 4444 codec which is a lossy format that was specifically designed for motion graphics and compositing, which allowed us to preserve the quality through production.

References and Additional Information

If you would like to learn more about this specific project, below are some additional resources.

• Director's Project Page: https://www.ilianfilm.com/a-cloud-holding-a-knife.html
• FilmFreeway Page: https://filmfreeway.com/aCloudholdingaknife