A short animated tribute to Mary Anning the Paleontologists, whose findings contributed to important changes in scientific thinking and the way look at the history of life on earth. The film is more narrative focussed than educational and is more of historical fiction than traditional explanatory animation.

The story follows Mary on a physical and emotional journey to one of her most impactful discoveries, a fossil of an Ichthyosaur. This mysterious monster made people think about the history of the Earth and if it was possible that it could be older than what man first had thought. But before that can happen, Mary has to find her courage to change history.

The passion and dedication Mary had for her research, even when it made her struggle to survive, inspired me to make this short animation as my graduation project.

This short was my final project I made for the Master Animation program at the AKV|St.Joost Master Institute. To make the most of my limited time I combined frame for frame animation with reference video's. For example, for the dinosaur animation I looked at a lot of dolphin video's and took screenshots of the poses that I could use in my pose to pose animation.  

Originally, I had a lot more colors planned. But I limited it to only the lighter blue for the details because of time restraint.   

For 'Mary' I did a lot of sketchy storyboarding until I was happy with the story. I wanted to combine her journey of discovery with the loss of her father.

An early environmental design