Blue Marble - Written, Directed and Produced by Y3 student Bella Jarvis

A short, creative mixed media animation consisting of digital artworks, handmade puppet animations and stop motion.

Duration – 3:50

Music – Red Squirrel Productions (Song – Tides II)

Set in the future, a young child is surrounded by a dying environment, polluted and consumed. The blindness and ignorance of mankind has created this dystopia for the future technological world, giving the younger generation a challenge for existence and sustainability. The child walks into the surrounding burnt trees and wasteland, wondering what the Earth was like before its destruction and decay. A creature of the forest emerges from the shadows frightening the child at first, revealing a hopeless and desperate tiger. The child sees the tiger’s pain, feeling sorrowful and regretful for its suffering. The child touches the tiger creating a transition of colour and life. Instinctively, the young child embarks on a journey of regeneration and restoration, with the power to touch and change the environments colour and vitality, restoring the forest and its inhabitants. The visual transition of colour and life pervades the environment back to its natural state of health, restoring the Earth. Animals revive from low transparencies, water flows throughout the streams, life and greenery fills the environment recreating an organically rich world. The child finds a small blue seed emerge form a growing flower, resembling a blue marble that dissolves into the Earth in space. The purpose in saving this land, this home, reunites all living things in a shared balance of life and coexistence, disconnecting mankind’s exploitation, dominance and destruction. 

 ‘Blue Marble’ is an expression of value for sustainability and an admiration for the natural world. I want to share my admiration for our natural systems, animals and nature, in the hope that the audience can identify with Earth’s plight, encouraging thought and action through this visual stimulation. The child symbolises a younger generation with the power to resolve and change the fate of the world; an intuitive innocence portrayed to have more wisdom than experience and isolation. I felt the impulse to create this animation based upon my own desires and hopes for a better world, a yearning for a less isolated community; for a kinder relationship with the world and the people within it.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Bella has recently been nominated for the Creative Challenge Award - see previous posts.