Lewis Tarver
2025
My thesis film, SEISMA, is a sci-fi drama following a group of scientists trying to excavate a huge fossil. This whole experience, although difficult, was really rewarding to me both artistically and technically. I haven’t ever done a real narrative-based drama (I keep referring to this as ‘serious story’) so I was definitely intimidated and excited at the same time. I saw a lot of my peers around me doing a “pilot type” short that could be developed and sold to companies, and have had real success from that right in front of my eyes. I considered this, but after much thought, instead chose to use this experience to create exactly what I wanted to do in my own time. I saw these as two paths; commercial, and personally fulfilling. My reasoning for choosing the latter was the fact that I have the rest of my life to create commercial comedy media for monetary gain, so I should take this opportunity to do something I have wanted to do for a long time– Making fully complete, serious stories was always a dream of mine, though it is not common in the Western animation industry unless it is specifically geared towards child audiences. I chose to use the last of my time in college to do something purely for me, and although I wish I had different career opportunities at the end, I stand by my choice and do not think I will regret it. Coming out of school, I also feel excited to make something more commercial and am not feeling ‘sick of it.’ Looking at the film from the other side, I definitely underestimated how long building a story that makes real sense would take, and it left not much time for execution. I was inspired by low-budget anime compositing a lot for the production – while watching some this year I had noticed the extremely low amount of drawings yet a very clear and engaging narrative told by them. I don't think I really like the film a lot, or think it’s my best work, but I am pretty satisfied with what I was able to make and accepted pretty early on that it wouldn’t be my magnum opus. I am really proud of my artistic growth, though, and it definitely scratched a storytelling itch I was having.
My first idea for SEISMA was the interaction between nature and technology. I first had these visions of a supercomputer interacting with the layers of sedimentary rock formed by eons of erosion. Early inspirations were Neon Genesis Evangelion, DUNE, Annihilation, and Three Body Problem, all hard sci-fi dramas that I think are some of the most interesting stories about humanity and nature told to date. The original plot was about asking a supercomputer some sort of impossible, personal question. The longer I went on with this route the more I struggled to find a compelling story with this outline. I also found that it seemed like I was commenting on AI, which was rapidly developing during the film. I don't really have a fully formed opinion on AI yet, as I feel the full effects of it are completely unpredictable at this moment, so I shied away from attempting to comment on it. I tend to think of stories, especially short stories that don't take up much time, as pretty much just a setup and a climactic moment. I usually start with the climax as the first idea, so the earthquake sequence and The Body were the first elements of the final story that I came up with. All other story building was a sort of puzzle based on this sequence of how the characters would get there and be directly involved with all of the events. Most of my other works are more ‘artsy’ or rely more on building an aesthetic or feeling, so trying to write a fully-formed narrative that makes sense and doesn’t have large plot holes was much harder than anticipated. It took up the majority of the time I spent working on the film, which is why the animation was quite limited. I tried to use as many tricks as I could, taken from the aforementioned compositing styles, to make it look as complete as possible.
Visual style and music were integral to this story. I made the music as a very early step, which is unorthodox for most people. My artistic process is always extremely tied to sound and music, and I find it hard to visualize the final product without some sort of auditory concept first. Most of my work begins at this stage. SEISMA’s music was originally inspired by the 2024 film Challengers, and progressive electronic music in general. The film (scored by the iconic Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails) uses electronic dance music to tell intimate, brash, and zoomed-in interactions between characters in a way I found really compelling. The timing of the music exactly follows the emotional beats in a way where the viewer can't help but feel the story. This is typically the purpose of more grandiose or classical scores, but Challengers was able to do this just as successfully with dance music, which kind of blew my head straight off when I first saw it. I tried to use this concept in SEISMA to add emotional depth while maintaining a short time frame. The original animatic was 14 minutes, but I had to cut half of the storyboards and still have it make sense somehow. Music was a huge part of this battle, which helped a ton for distilling the emotional beats of the plot. I tried to have the visuals both contrast and align with the audio– there are natural sceneries and painted landscapes infiltrated by technological patterns and repeating lines.
The theme of technology and nature’s interaction evolved into a more environmentalist question: If industry helps humanity but hurts nature, at what point does that cross over into directly hurting the whole of humanity rather than just indirectly? And at what point is it morally correct to shut it off? Who makes that decision? And what if that industry has ‘life’ of its own? That ended up being the main story’s theme, but the personal theme related to the characters’ experience was the idea of building pressure. The main character has constant pressure being added on him by all parts of the narrative. This was essentially expression of how I felt over the course of college– I felt excited and valued for my talents there and was able to do work at lightning speed, but during the four years i was here, I felt that the building pressure of constant production and deadlines made me seize up and become unable to enjoy the present. Every year we are presented with this “impossible problem:” make a high quality film where you must do basically every aspect of it in a time limit that most outside animators would say is pretty unreasonable. (This is all while trying to pass regular classes at college and stay afloat academically.) The stress of this also appeared in my physicality and had strange effects on my mind and body that I had never seen before. I consider myself pretty strong mentally, and grew up having to learn a lot of tools and techniques to make myself more sane, so this was quite shocking. Trying to figure out what they meant, why they were happening, and what they were trying to tell me was intriguing yet painful in a way. A lot of my work deals with the physicality of feeling inside the body, and I definitely wanted to add this into the film to express these strange effects on my own body. In the mind, I found an extreme lean to analytical processes, rather than intuitive, over the course of school– I think this manifested from a fear of making any sort of mistake in such a high pressure scenario. Trying to find my way back to intuitive art-making became a strong personal goal of mine. The main character’s final solution to the “impossible problem” he is given is to intuitively “feel” the earth through sensory connection to his own body. The pressure erupts from this action and kills a valuable living being, for better or for worse.
