NONNA
Abby Cali
Nonna is a stop motion short film featuring a magical Sicilian grandmother. The titular character was born from a love of the artist’s family's southern Italian island heritage and an interest in imbuing that Mediterannean culture with her own twist of magic and oddities. Influenced heavily by the global pandemic, the artist also represents themes of solitude, and of cooking as a form of company in times of loneliness. The protagonist, Nonna, is created out of felted wool and has a fully articulated wire armature skeleton that allows her to come to life through animation. The puppet, set, and props are handmade and based off of concept sketches developed throughout this thesis process. As a stop motion film, each frame is one photograph that is staged and lit by the artist. The illusion of movement comes from moving the props and character in minute increments between each photograph, and then displaying the photographs quickly one after another in the final animation.
THE MAKING OF
PUPPET
The rough concepts sketches for the film’s main character and props provided a plan for the construction of the final 3D sculpted form. The puppet character was constructed out of aluminum armature wire, needle felted wool, and moldable poly plastic. The clothing is typical of a rural southern Italian woman of the time period.
SET
The set of the film was constructed on plywood that was raised up on 2x4s so that the artist could reach underneath and screw down the character and important set pieces.
PROPS
The props were created to imbue a sense of lived in coziness to Nonna’s kitchen. Everything that was purchased and not handmade was modified by the artist to fit the old and magical atmosphere of the film.
NONNA, EXPANDED
VIDEO GAME AND FACE FILTERS
Nonna’s world lives on in media outside her short film, in video game character concept artwork and social media augmented reality filters. The filters can be found by navigating to the tab on the artist’s instagram page (www.instagram.com/abbycali.art) on a mobile device.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Abby Cali is an illustrator and animator based in the Boston, MA area. She is dedicated to character-based art practices that celebrate the wonderful weirdness of our wacky world. Abby loves making drawings come to life with animation, sewing cute apparel and tiny sculptures, and lettering zany GIFs. When she’s not drawing or teaching Abby can be found playing cooperative board games, cooking up a storm, hanging out with her nearly toothless cat, or hiking very very slowly past interesting flora and fauna.