A Study in Scent
Personal Short Film

This is a short film I got to make with my buddy Nick Parente for our freelance collective Boxfort.
We wanted to explore our sense of smell and how certain scents have strong emotional memories linked to them.

CREDITS:
Concept, Illustration & Animation - Nick Parente, Scott Hoch
Sound Design - Wes Slover/Sono Sanctus
VO - Fred Stella
Recorded by - Ben Zito at Centennial Sound

Stills

Pre-Production

So the initial idea I had was to make something with a tactile, hand made quality to it. The previous Boxfort shorts had a lot of 3D in them and I wanted to show our diversity in style as a collective. I’ve seen some folks, Kelli Anderson in particular, make some really fun looking animated loops using a risograph printer and wanted to try my hand at it.

What I quickly realized during my motion tests (which you can see below) is that I needed to keep each shot short and sweet, preferably looped. The Risograph could only handle 2-4 colors and you need to manage how much paper and ink you’re willing to use. It was here that Nick and I decided to break the film into loosely connected vignettes.

It was around this time we landed on scent memories. There was an interesting cause and effect nature to each scene that Nick and I enjoyed but it quickly became apparent that the scenes needed to be longer and more complex to tell the story effectively. This, along with the pandemic, caused us to move away from the Risograph as we no longer had access to it and even if we did the film would have been too complicated to print and maintain the level of detail we wanted. I still love how Riso looks and am looking forward to making something else with it soon.

I was primarily responsible for the middle scene with the bakery, though I helped on some of the animation on the end scene and title card. We animated everything in grayscale because the Riso printer assigns colors based on value. Luckily in After Effects you can also do this with a CC toner effect. We explored lots of different palettes before we landed on what you see in the final cut of the film.