Project Members: Jingwen Zhang / Songyeuhuang
Project Type: Experimental Animation / Stylised Narrative Animation / Black-and-White Sketch Short Film
Project Overview
Fragments of the Real is an experimental animated short film that explores war, trauma, emotional numbness, and the collapse of perception.
The story takes place in an abandoned theatre. At the centre of the stage, a young girl dances alone, while rows of silent, expressionless soldiers sit in the audience. As the dance continues, reality gradually begins to fracture. Guided by a fox, the girl enters a series of hallucinated spaces, including trenches, forests, ruined cities, and scenes of destruction.
These visions appear like fragments of memory. It is never completely clear whether they are real events, traumatic memories, or psychological projections from the girl’s inner world. Eventually, the film returns to the ruined theatre. A soldier stands up and shoots the girl. After she falls, the soldier salutes, while the other soldiers mechanically applaud. The final image shows a fox lying on the stage.
Through this cold, absurd, and fragmented visual language, the film aims to show that war does not only destroy human bodies. It also damages perception, emotion, and empathy, making people gradually lose their normal response to pain and death.
Story Concept
The story is built around two central ideas: dance and war memory.
In this film, the girl’s dance is not simply a performance. It becomes an external expression of her psychological state. As the story develops, her movements become increasingly unstable and uncontrolled, suggesting that she is being affected by trauma, hallucination, and memory.
The fox acts as a guide between reality and hallucination. It can be understood as a symbol from the subconscious, or as a medium connecting the girl’s external world with her inner psychological space. The trenches, forest scenes, destroyed city, and suspended bodies together form a broken mental landscape.
The ending presents violence in a cold and almost absurd way. The girl is shot, yet the soldiers show no emotional reaction. Instead, they continue to applaud mechanically, as if death has become part of the performance. This moment highlights how war alienates human beings and weakens their ability to feel empathy.
Visual Style
The project uses a black-and-white sketch aesthetic. We wanted the overall atmosphere to feel dark, oppressive, and slightly disturbing.
The visual texture is inspired by hand-drawn sketches, charcoal lines, rough scanned images, and printmaking. Instead of creating a polished and clean visual world, we chose to work with rough lines, strong shadows, unstable textures, and fragmented compositions.
The main visual keywords for this project include:
Black and white / Sketch / Ruins / Theatre / War / Soldiers / Fox / Fragmentation / Psychological space / Subtle horror / Emotional numbness / Mechanical movement
During the visual testing process, I focused on exploring how line quality, shadow, rough materials, and unstable image textures could create a space between reality and hallucination. We wanted the audience to feel that the world of the film is not fully stable, but constructed from memory, trauma, and distorted perception.
Connection to the Brief
This project responds to the brief theme “Fragments of the Real / The Artificial.”
Rather than presenting reality as complete, stable, and objective, our film explores how reality can be broken apart and reorganised through trauma.
The theatre, trenches, forest, and ruined city are all fragments of the real world. However, in the girl’s perception, these spaces are rearranged into an unstable psychological map. Through animation, scene construction, and stylised visual experimentation, we transform real spaces into an artificial narrative environment filled with emotional and psychological meaning.
For me, “fragments of the real” does not only refer to physical fragments of space. It also refers to fragments of memory, emotion, and perception after they have been damaged by violence.
Collaboration and Roles
Jingwen Zhang
In this project, I mainly focused on environment construction and visual style testing.
My responsibilities included the initial design and construction of key spaces, such as the abandoned theatre, war-related environments, the forest, and the ruined city. I also worked on visual experiments for the black-and-white sketch style, including line work, shadows, rough textures, and the slightly unsettling atmosphere of the film.
In addition, I contributed to a small part of the girl’s animation and tested cloth simulation for her movement. These tests helped explore how the girl’s body movement and costume dynamics could support the emotional tension of the dance.
Songyeu Huang
Songyeuhuang mainly focused on storyboarding, character animation, and camera movement.
He was responsible for the storyboard design and most of the character animation, including the movements of the girl, the fox, the soldiers, and some figures in the hallucination scenes. He also designed most of the camera movement and shot rhythm, helping to build the transitions between reality and hallucination.
His work played an important role in shaping the emotional pacing of the film, especially in how the camera moves between the theatre space and the fragmented hallucination sequences.
Process
Personal Reflection
For me, this project was an important experiment in environment construction and stylised visual storytelling.
One of the main questions I explored was whether an environment could become more than just a background. In Fragments of the Real, the theatre, ruins, forest, and war spaces are not only locations where the story takes place. They also reflect the girl’s psychological state. The broken architecture, dark shadows, and unstable textures suggest the collapse of her inner world.
The black-and-white sketch style also allowed me to explore a more emotional and non-realistic visual language. The rough lines and imperfect textures make the images feel more like fragments of memory than a stable objective reality. This visual approach felt suitable for representing trauma, hallucination, and psychological instability.
This project also made me realise that animation does not always need to explain trauma through a clear and direct storyline. Sometimes, repeated images, fragmented spaces, symbolic animals, and mechanical human gestures can express psychological damage in a more subtle and powerful way.
Project Summary
Fragments of the Real is an experimental animation project that transforms war trauma into a fragmented, cold, and unstable visual world.
Instead of using a traditional narrative to explain war directly, we used dance, hallucination, the fox, and mechanical soldiers to express how people gradually lose perception and emotion in violent environments.
Through this project, we explored how stylised animation can represent psychological experience. For me personally, it was also a valuable opportunity to experiment with black-and-white sketch aesthetics, ruined spaces, and unstable image textures. I hope these visual choices can strengthen the psychological atmosphere of the film and allow the environment itself to become part of the storytelling.