The Children of the Nursery

With Nienke Nagtzaam, and me, Gijs van Haaster 2023

In this project I was working with Nienke Nagtzaam. Video to be seen in the link above this text. We worked on this project together while we did other projects of our own, all in the span of half a year.  We worked for Nationaal Monument Kamp Vught, our National Museum on this former concentration camp in World War 2. They provided us with this story and answered some of our questions and provided us with feedback during the animation. The story we chose to make an animation about was a story from Poland. This story was about a nursery that was massacred by the Nazi regime in one night.

Because the story was about a group of people and only a few people were eyewitnesses to what happened, we experimented in our first storyboard/ideas with telling the story from the point of view  of the eye-witnesses. This was mainly because one of the eye witnesses had an intriguing way of saying how they were taken away.

It was something along the lines of "as they where taken, their screams rose up to the sky".

This felt to me, as if they thought the people where already dead when they where being put in the trucks. Altough I put a huge effort into making a more artistic interpetation, my group (and eventualy me as well) thought it would be better to focus on the simple message.

That's when I thought of making the style with color pencil to make the video from of a child-like view. But not only a child-like view was needed, so the colors where made to feel sad to fit the story.

The monsterization of the Nazi's was also something I came up with. The Nazi's did not feel like an important part of this story because what they did had no depth at all just simple murder.

The line art and animation of the whole project was done by me, and half of the storyboard I made. Nienke colored and put together the scenes and the music.