Families are beautiful mosaics composed of uniquely wonderful and painful puzzle pieces of memories. Every family is a particular blueprint of stories and relationships. Families are filled with mysteries and magic; love and forgiveness; triumph and turmoil. They are thermoses of hot chocolate on sleigh rides. They are Sunday dinners with anyone that needs kind company and hot food. They are heartbreaks and losses. They are new places and new friends. They are hot tears on soft cheeks. They are words that can not be taken back and words we want to repeat until our throats are dry. All families are filled with millions of stories. Some get passed down. Some are forgotten. But each person of each family is a unique chapter, without which the story is not complete.
This is a reimagined family tree that embodies what I think is so beautiful about families. Each glowing orb on the tree represents a family member and contains every memory of that individual within it. These memories are depicted in certain scenes of the animation. The tree extends into large warped branches that represent branches of the family tree. Near the end of the animation, an orb falls off of a branch. This represents the last person with the knowledge of their tree. The last person who remembers the stories, memories, and the lives of their predecessors. As the orb rolls away, it plants itself into the ground and a new tree begins to grow. The start of a new tree filled with memories to be shared, experienced, and created.
This animation was created using Autodesk’s Maya, a 3D modelling software, and took about 35 hours to model, texture, and animate. I was inspired by Inside Out (2015), Coco (2017), and Avatar (2009). I think that families and intergenerational relationships are such uniquely human experiences. I wanted to capture that beauty while reinventing the conventional family tree and adding some magic to its more logical purpose.
