Gabriele Cepokaityte
“A wandering guardian, tasked with returning lost objects from alternate worlds to their rightful dimensions, discovers a mysterious creature unlike anything he has encountered. Bound by duty yet driven by curiosity, he embarks on a perilous multidimensional journey traversing strange realms and surviving hostile habitats in search of the creature’s true home.”
A short film focusing on everchanging environments and backgrounds.
My objective for this project was to explore the possibilities of environment-driven storytelling through the creation of immersive and atmospheric worlds. While the film does include characters, their narrative was never the central focus. Instead, I wanted to experiment with how landscapes, lighting, colour, and composition could communicate emotion and create a strong sense of place. Through the project, I set out to design a variety of unique worlds, dimensions, and environments, each developed using different artistic styles, approaches, and production pipelines. I also approached the film as a personal showreel, using it as an opportunity to showcase the range of my skills, creative interests, and visual style as an artist. In doing so, I aimed to expand my abilities not only as a background artist, but also in visual development and concept design, while discovering new ways to bring imaginative and immersive worlds to life.
This project served as a significant milestone in my creative and professional development, providing valuable experience in environment design, visual storytelling, and artistic experimentation. The process offered an opportunity to collaborate with a team of people who played an important role in bringing the project to life. Beyond the final outcome of the project, it stands as an important learning experience and a foundational step within my evolving career path, one that will continue to inform and inspire future work and collaborations.
My thesis examines why the deaths of animal characters in film often evoke more profound emotional responses from the audiences than the deaths of human characters. Drawing on classical narratology, animal narratology, and phenomenological theory the study investigates how narrative structure, perspective and cinematic techniques shape audience empathy toward non-human protagonists. The analysis of this thesis focuses on the case study of Hachi: A Dog’s Tale(2009), by Lasse Hallström, a film which despite the death of a human character, the emotional impact cultivates in the death of a central animal character. Using narratological concepts such as focalisation, narrative voice, and time alongside the insights of animal studies into narratology, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied perception, this research explores how film form encourages viewers to engage empathetically with animal experiences. The study demonstrates that certain techniques including restrained narration, repetition, visual perspective and time manipulation are critical and intensify the emotional attachment the audience feels to animal characters, shaping their perception of loss. By integrating structural narrative analysis with theories of interspecies empathy, this thesis argues that animal deaths function as powerful narrative strategies that challenge anthropocentric storytelling and encourage audience reflection on the emotional and ethical connections of human-animal relationships.
I'm an aspiring background artist with a passion for natural environments and bringing immersive worlds to life. My work focuses on capturing atmosphere and storytelling through landscapes and detail. I'm especially inspired by the way environments can shape emotion, atmosphere, and narrative, without dialogue or character at the forefront. I love to explore and experiment with different mediums and approaches, finding new methods of curating the reality of the new worlds and bringing them life in their own special way. My fourth-year film reflects this through visual storytelling. Moving forward, I hope to continue developing my skills in background and environment design creating spaces that feel alive, memorable and emotionally resonant.
