Live a Little

By Jenny Jokela

(Germany, U.K.)

After making her graduation film Barbeque, which dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder, animator Jenny Jokela knew she wanted to tackle something light-hearted. “I wanted to make something that would make me laugh, which is why I wanted to collaborate with my best friend Celia Hillo, who wrote the script for the film,” she says. “I tend to see the film as a celebration of our late teens/young adulthood, struggling with feelings of loneliness and not always fitting in with the social norms of how ‘a good woman’ should behave.”

Made for about 3,000 euros ($3,370) in about four months, Live a Little was funded by a grant that supports cultural projects by Finnish-Swedish artists. The short was fully hand-painted with acrylic paint on paper. Then, it was digitally assembled using Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere.

Jokela says the budget was so small that she had to be very efficient with her time. She adds, “Before making the film I was unsure how I would find collaborating with a writer, as I usually write my own films, but in the end I found it liberating and inspiring.”

The animator, who is a huge fan of the anime classic Paprika and the works of Nathalie Djurberg and Suzan Pitt, says she loves the sense of complete freedom and power of creation animation gives her. She adds, “And there’s always something new to learn and improve. I just hope audiences will get a little chuckle out of my short and that it brings out their own memories of their youth.”