The Route to Nowhere • Cé Marina Studio

The Route to Nowhere
Self initiated stop motion:
Cé Marina · Agueda Peña · Lina Ortega

We are a group of creatives who wanted to make a self-initiated project in which to combine our disciplines. The team is formed by an illustrator, a paper artist, two stop motion animators, a music producer and a mastering producer.
This project aims to raise awareness of an ongoing issue that affects millions of people worldwide and is still the subject of much debate: immigration. As we have experienced, one cannot imagine how hard it is to achieve a dream far from home, as well as the process of integration into a new culture. For others, this situation is much more difficult and even dangerous considering the risks they have to face on the way to this new life.

Structure of the project

The project consists of three animations in which migratory scenes are recreated. The characterizations were thought of as fruits because we wanted to use a simple analogy to humans.

Endless Sea
In the first animation several bananas travel by sea to an unknown destination. We can see how the boat is overloaded with the weight of the passengers. This, along with the hazards of traveling in the open sea, make the journey much more dangerous.

The Beast
“La Bestia” is recreated in this animation. These trains travel along Mexico and in addition to transporting materials and corn, they carry undocumented immigrants. Is the quickest, cheapest but most dangerous way to cross the U.S. border.

The Wall
In this animation, we made a visual referral of a wall built in the middle of a desert. Every day several fruit families cross a wide desert and they see their dreams are truncated by a giant obstacle. Many mixed emotions are perceived in the scene as hope, frustration and sadness.

The creative process

Unlike many projects that begin on paper, the process of creating these animations was quite different.

*As a detail for those who do not know what stop motion animation is about, to record a second you need twelve frames, so when recording a scene without cuts, the size of the set is very important. That’s why the sets of these animations are one and a half meters long.

Illustrations

For the development, Cé Marina has been in charge of creating the visuals of the three animations. She has illustrated digitally the scenarios as well as the characters.