Students, Alumni, and Faculty Come Together to Create “Love Forevermore”

Love Forevermore
Directed by Jeremy Mowery and Annette Bedrossian

I’m sure you are all familiar with the classic tale of Romeo and Juliet…but what if that story was reimagined by none other than Edgar Allen Poe? That is the question we sought to answer in making the short stop motion film, Love Forevermore. The project was also based on E.A. Poe’s short poem, Spirits of the Dead, which explores the afterlife – a fitting topic thatmeshes well alongside the tragic Shakespearean story.

Love Forevermore was painstakingly crafted, one frame at a time, by AVFX Students, Faculty and Alumni of Woodbury University over a period of a year and a half. The core team consisting of Woodbury Alumni: Annette Bedrossian, Tsebahat Fiseha, and Raffi Antounian along with Jeremy Mowery (Woodbury Assistant Professor of Animation & VFX) and their close friend and colleague, composer Aaron Cruz spent six months developing the story. The idea was the brainchild of Annette Bedrossian who then co-wrote the script with Jeremy Mowery. Aaron then composed a rough score while the rest of the team produced storyboards, culminating in an Animatic – a full cut of the film complete with the rough score and the boards as the visuals. That took us the first half of 2023.

Jeremy had also applied for a Faculty Development grant from Woodbury and was awarded funds for materials. Development was completed by the time the grant clock began ticking. We had a year to complete the project, and working primarily on Saturdays, was not an easy feat when producing a 6-minute stop motion animated film, but the team pulled it off, just in the nick of time.

The first purchase was the armatures – the skeletons of the stop motion puppets that enable them to hold different poses, thus be animated. There are 2 human characters, Elenora and Dante, who each have a professional grade armature from Julian Clark Studios in England. Once those were in hand, Jeremy began puppet fabrication and worked with Tsebahat who made their costumes. Their faces were modeled and sculpted digitally by two Woodbury seniors, Dante by Nico Carranza and Elenora by Abbey Bokros. They made 5 different faces for each character to show the different emotions needed throughout the film and these were 3D printed. We then made molds of the faces so we could cast duplicates which we embedded magnets into during the casting process so they could be snapped on and off the head with ease during animation.

The Fall of 2023 was spent almost totally on fabricating sets, props and puppets. All forms of animation take a lot of time, but depending on the type of animation (2D, 3D or Stop Motion), certain phases of production are longer or shorter. In stop motion, the longest phase of production is fabrication; once that is complete animation usually goes a bit faster than it doesfor 2D and 3D. We ended up building the first 2 sets along with numerous props and animated the first shot at the end of the semester.

In early Spring of 2024, we quickly wrapped up animation on the first two sets and then began building the final set which was also the largest – the cemetery. We wanted that set to be big so we could include as much detail as possible, but the size ended up being restricted by how far our arms could reach for animation. The reason being was that our protagonist was in the center of the set for most of the scene, so we needed to comfortably be able to reach; another difference with stop motion, there are physical limitations that you don’t have to worry about with 2D and 3D animation. It ended up being 3ft by 3ft and consisted of several trees, a wall with a fence that circled the cemetery, a big front gate and 24 gravestones (13 of which were 3D modeled by one of our students, Mallory McLaughlin). We made molds of about half of the gravestones to make duplicates and everyone on the crew selected a gravestone to paint their name onto. That was a fun idea we thought of to use for the ending credits. Every gravestone got a close up shot that we cut between instead of doing rolling credits.

The second half of Spring was all animation. Students took turns animating puppets which also included a small Raven. That character was smaller and had an aluminum wire armature. She did a lot of flying and Alex Leiker handled much of the Raven animation which was fun and included a physical rig to hold the puppet in mid-air. That was a fun experience and students got to see the differences between animating puppets with rigs and techniques for doing so with and without camera movement. Whenever camera movement is involved, it takes an extra step to animate a character held by a rig, so the shot is set up for rig removal in post. By the end of the spring semester, we were nearly finished with animation, and the last few shots were completed by late May. The month of June was all spent on Post, done by Jeremy Mowery along with a finalized score by Aaron Cruz. In July we were already setting up the project on Film Freeway to begin submitting to festivals. So far, the project has screened at 8 different festivals and won 4 awards. We started with a cast and crew screening here at Woodbury in early September of 2024, and by the end of the month Love Forevermore had already screened at its first festival, Halloween Mixtape.  Recent fests also include the Planet 9 Fest and the Night Frights Festival, which was sponsored by Horrorcon LA and took place at the LA Convention Center. The film is being released on Vimeo Halloween 2025.