Echoes
What is the film about?
Strange places take shape in the glow of a torchlight, and the sound of water droplets on the ground punctuates
our footsteps. In the distance, we hear muffled music, where does it come from?
What influenced it?
Echoes was heavily influenced by Robinson Drossos’ immersion in Paris’ graffiti and urban exploration culture, which he was involved with for almost a decade. Through graffiti, he discovered abandoned buildings, underground tunnels and hidden passages beneath the city, many of which directly inspired locations and moments in the film. He also drew on his fascination with exploration, mystery and journeys into the unknown, blending real places and experiences with imagined environments to create what he describes as a symbolic, initiatory quest. Artistically, the film reflects his interest in combining sound and image, as well as his love of traditional hand-drawn animation and experimentation with visual storytelling.
A little background information...
Drossos created Echoes as his graduation film at the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, where he had been exploring the relationship between sound and movement through animation. Having long felt torn between music and visual art, he saw the film as an opportunity to unite his two passions by composing the music, designing the sound and animating the visuals himself. The seven-minute short became a distillation of the themes and techniques that interested him most, particularly exploration, diving into the unknown and creating a personal sensory experience where image and sound evolve together. The story’s journey underground was also inspired by the contrast he experienced between the noise of Paris and the strange, liberating silence found beneath the city.
How was the film made?
Echoes took approximately a year and a half to complete, with Drossos handling virtually every aspect of production himself, including writing, storyboarding, animation, music composition, sound design and final mixing. After developing the script, storyboard and animatic, he hand-drew all of the film’s environments in pencil on paper. The character was initially animated digitally using a drawing tablet, but every frame was then redrawn by hand so he could preserve the texture of paper and the imperfections of pencil lines. Once completed, each drawing was scanned or photographed and assembled digitally to create movement. Drossos also composed the music before writing the story, later continually adjusting both sound and image throughout production to achieve what he describes as a “perfect symbiosis” between the two.