Real Take is an animated short film about a young autistic adult who struggles with communication.

What is Real Take about?
The setting takes place in the park, in Greg’s sketchbook, outside the flower shop, and in his house. The characters in the film are Greg, his support dog Franky, his ex-girlfriend, the woman, the monster in Greg’s sketchbook, and the mugger.

Greg is a young man with autism. He lives alone with his support dog Franky. He uses a sketchbook to document moments and experiences in his life, as well as a calming tool. He looks back at sketches depicting his previous relationship with his girlfriend, the first of which has her telling Greg about his inability to face conflict. Responding to the ‘human’ call to be ‘better’, Greg tries to fit in with life around him. When meeting a woman in the park, he tries and tries again to navigate the moments and experiences of conflict and other strong emotions. He also confronts his difficulties regarding getting to know a new person. Can he be successful?

The film is about struggling to communicate and overcoming fear of conflict, and exposes misconceptions to do with neurodiversity. The main themes in Real Take are conflict, understanding, communication, empowerment, overcoming one’s fears, and standing up for others.

Realist elements:
Park.
Greg’s dislike of noise.
Greg’s fear of conflict.
Franky, the support dog.
Sketches depicting bad memories.
Greg’s ex-girlfriend.
Greg wanting things (such as a tub of soya spread in the refrigerator) to be in order.
Greg’s struggles to communicate.
Woman smiling and giving Greg’s dropped sketchbook to him.
Closed flower shop.
Greg’s house.
The mugger following and attacking the woman.
Franky’s confusion on whether to protect Greg or save the woman.
Franky biting the mugger’s leg.
Greg remembering his ex-girlfriend telling him about his inability to face conflict.
Greg gathering the courage to stand up to the mugger and take his knife away.
Greg’s sympathy towards the traumatised woman.

Formalist elements:
Greg having a blue border outline around himself when having negative thoughts (fantasy).
Point-of-view shots with Greg looking at his sketchbook and the woman and walking towards the mugger.
Animated sketches playing through Greg’s mind (fantasy).
Point-of-view close-up shot of Greg’s ex-girlfriend’s mouth (fantasy).
Text saying, ‘Nervous’ and ‘Say something!’ forming in Greg’s head (fantasy).
Knot forming over Greg’s stomach to represent his fear and agitation (fantasy).
Monster sketch to represent Greg’s anger (fantasy).

Perspective:
The film uses a subjective perspective as it mainly focuses on Greg and not on the other characters. Examples include his animated sketches, the blue outline enclosing him, his various expressions, point-of-view shots where he looks at his ex-girlfriend’s mouth and the woman, and loud foley sound effects (such as turning a page, Greg’s stomach rumbling or building, emotional drum noises), all of which make the viewer feel close to him.

Colour:
At the beginning, the film mostly uses cold, less saturated colours for the park scenes and the animated sketches, fitting with Greg;s somber mood and giving the sketches the appearance of a distant memory and a dark past. As the film progresses, the interior of Greg’s house and the park scenes during the afternoon use warm, brighter, more saturated colours. This represents the rise of Greg gathering the courage and determination to face conflict and stand up to the mugger, and his sympathy towards the woman in a happy open ending.

Editing:
Camera zooms and pans are used throughout the film, such as the first scene with Greg and Franky on the bench (the focal point), Greg looking at his sketches before and after they play in his mind, the mugger following the woman outside Greg’s house, which he does not notice (mise-en-scène); Franky’s confusion on whether to protect Greg or save the woman, et cetera. Fades are used between scenes to show the passage of time and change in tone, such as when the film fades from Greg’s angry monster sketch to Franky sleeping peacefully in his basket in Greg’s house.

Action scene:
Greg is safe in his home, drawing in his sketchbook.
But he is unaware of the mugger, whom Franky notices.
Therefore, he walks out of his house to the park without worry.
But he hears the woman scream.
Therefore, he looks around and sees the mugger attacking her.
But Greg is apprehensive.
Therefore, Franky is confused on whether to protect his master or save the woman.
But he sees Greg panicking.
Therefore, he springs into action, biting the mugger’s leg.
But meanwhile. the shocked Greg does not know what to do.
Therefore, he remembers his ex-girlfriend telling him about his inability to face conflict.
But rather than acting scared, he gets more determined to face his fears.
Therefore, he takes the mugger’s knife away, and the mugger runs off.
But the woman is left traumatised by the event.
Therefore, Greg sympathetically shows her his sketches.

Why and how was the film made?:
Real Take was conceived in 2022 as an entry for Screen South’s Estuary on Film event. I did moodboards, concept art, the script and a schedule, and submitted them to Screen South. However, the idea was not chosen by the event, but I still wanted to make the film, so I continued. Production was part-time and lasted until this month. The film was made using Adobe Photoshop, Animate, After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Inspired by live action-animation films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and a real life roller coaster scene from Wandaland by Richard Noble,
I took photographs in a park in Ramsgate and used them as background, experimenting with them to represent the contrast between Greg’s world and the outside world. Adobe Stock images were also used as backgrounds for the park the flower shop and Greg’s house, with some being used as props in the latter. I watched other films for inspiration. Feeling My Way by Jonathan Hodgson had scenes with coloured outlines around rubbish bins and a square order around a man sitting in a laundromat, which inspired me to give Greg is blue outline to represent his nervousness, sadness, loneliness, restrictiveness and separation from his surroundings. Scenes from Mary and Max in which Mx wants logic and order I his life were used as inspiration for Greg pushing down a crease on his trouser leg at the beginning, and his reactions to the misplaced tub of soya spread in one of his sketches and the closed flower shop. His internal struggles to communicate were based on Louis’ nervous introduction in Louis’ Shoes. I took inspiration from Lambert the Sheepish Lion for Greg’s ex-girlfriend’s criticism of his inability to face conflict, and his initial cautiousness and bravery when standing up to the mugger. The knot forming over Greg’s stomach when he struggles to communicate with the woman was inspired by a scene in Utopia Portals by Jessica Ashman.

The idea of using animated pencil sketch scenes to show Greg’s bad experiences with conflict came from a scene in Feeling My Way with a pencil-drawn bicycle and Louis’ Mind Palace in Louis’ Shoes. The look of the sketches was also inspired by Musical Traumas by Miloš Tomić. Greg’s point-of-view shots when looking back at his sketches were initially going to depict bordered eyes, inspired by Riley Andersen’s emotions watching her father feed her broccoli in Inside Out. The sketches were originally planned to be done in Photoshop, but were done in Procreate instead, and edited in After Effects. For the sketch were Greg’s ex-girlfriend misplaces a tub of soya spread in the refrigerator, I added text saying, ’15 minutes later…’ This was inspired by the “dialogue text” scenes from The Man With Beautiful Eyes by Jonathan Hodgson, as were the ‘Nervous’ and ‘Say something!’ texts that appear in Greg’s head when he struggles to communicate.

To create Greg’s nervous facial expressions in close-up shots, I traced shocked, disbelieved, nervous and worried faces from films such as Forrest Gump, Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey to use as reference. I used Richard Williams’ The Animator’s Survival Kit to creat neutral, calm/confident and cautious walk cycles for him. For Franky, I was inspired by Dug’s emotions from Up to depict Franky’s loyalty and care with wide eyes and a tilted head for his master Greg, and his uncertainty of whether to protect him or save the woman’ Carl’s sleeping pose in Despicable Me to fade from Greg’s monster sketch and animate Franky sleeping in his basket in Greg’s house; and Max’s confronting and shocked poses from The Secret Life of Pets and The Secret Life of Pets 2 to depict Franky’s alert when hearing the woman scream and deciding whether to protect Greg or save the woman, and his aggressive defence pose before charging over. When Franky bites the mugger’s leg, I used a scene from Animal Planet: Dog Bites Host as a reference when animating Franky moving his body forwards and around and wriggling his bottom. I also included the model sheet for Franky (based on reference sketches in the film’s title sequence. The music for the film was composed by Kate Wintie in Logic Pro X, with the addition of stock music provided by Randolph Matthews. I looked t film scenes where the music and sound effects build to add to the tension, like Anxiety by Mayshan Kelishadi and Joker. The technique of rotoscoping was used for three scenes that were difficult to animate: the woman’s arm handing Greg’s sketchbook to him, the mugger running away, and Greg kneeling down before calling Franky.

Genres:
The genres used in Real Take are realist-fiction (Greg’s dislike of noise and fear of conflict, Franky being Greg’s support dog, the sketchbook drawings showing Greg’s bad relationship with his ex-girlfriend, his struggles to communicate with the woman, et cetera) and fantasy (the sketches being animated, the monster sketch representing Greg’s anger).

Release:
The film was submitted to the Oska Bright Film Festival to be screened in 2026, but was not selected. It was selected as a finalist at the French Duck Film Festival. As of 6 November 2025, the film is available on the Creative Foundation’s website.

*Written in Notepad.

From December 2023 to 2024, I was producing animated sequences for a short film named Breath or Breathe. I downloaded and installed Blender, where I started to familiarise myself with the layout of the software. First, I learned how to add an object and move it around, modify objects, and render a scene, and tried some modelling and sculpting tools. Next, I loaded my reference artwork in a new window, and used “Sculpt Mode” to create a sculpted fox head to animate at a later date. I then looked at some processes to help refine the features on the fox character. I added colour and material behaviours to the head and face, and briefly looked at the “Node” editing space. I learnt how to unwrap my model and was ready to paint, but there were problems with the addition of textures. Because of this, I decided to move on to making stop motion breath animations, using sand-on-glass, ink, chalk and watercolour paint. During walks in Folkestone, I took photographs of surfaces with relaxing, calm textures to use in my sequences, and recorded the tide in Folkestone Beach coming in. I worked on timing ‘in’, ‘hold’ and ‘out’, and repeated the breathing sequences for 10 breaths, each one treated slightly differently with effects such as “Bulge”. After that, I watched some footage of murmurations. For the tide, I created “Time Remap” keyframes for it coming in for 2 seconds, held for 4 seconds and out again for 2 seconds, and applied different colours to it using “Hue/Saturation”. Next, I created some particle swarms by using motion paths, inspired by the murmuration footage. I used bubbles and flying fish textures for mine. I even did an animation where I used the Geometry Options “Curvature” and “Segments” to make the texture background bulge out and in to simulate breathing, gave a “3D Text” animation effect to ‘Breathe’, and made it three-dimensional by extending the “Extrusion Depth”.

In late February, Lydia Hibbert and I began coming with ideas for the breath film’s introduction: narration, text, diagrams, a growing and shaking animated brain with eyes (visual representation of tension building), multiple layers and colours. We watched I Am Here by Eoin Duffy, Detention by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and David Seitz, Focus by Alex Boya, and The Fake Calendar by Meky Ottawa as research, and I made a moodboard of brain images in different art styles (illustrations, vector graphics, abstract, lineart, et cetera). Then I used different brush techniques in Photoshop (“Roundness”, “Hardness”, “Opacity”, “Flow”, “Spacing”, “Size”, “Angle”) to create early sketch designs for the brain. We returned to my Blender fox head, where I unwrapped the textures of the eyes, mouth and the head itself, added shading and experimented with “Noise”, “Voronoi” and “Gradient Textures” and the “Color Ramp”, and painted the model in “Texture Paint”. The next day, I experimented with some advanced brush settings, “Shape Dymanics”, “Scattering” and “Texture”, and did some drawings focusing on the shape of the object (brain) rather than the outline, using the “Layer Mask”.

Between March and April, I looked at texture and colour. I experimented with “Color Dynamics”, “Shape Dynamics”, “Foreground Colors”, “Background Colors”, “Shading”, “Lighting”, the “Mixed Brush” (“Wet”, “Load” “Mix” and “Flow”), the “Paint Bucket”, “Gradients” and “Brush Modes”, using them to create some more designs for the brain. Next, I made notes on how the brains would be animated to convey emotion. For example, the blue brain in my “Color Dynamics” drawing would be for sadness and shake and wobble as if it were crying, and the “Shading and Lighting” brain would slowly grow and shrink to simulate breathing. Later in March, I added armatures to my Blender fox head’s ears, eyes, mouth and nose, and came up with the idea of having the brain fade into the background just before the breath sequences begin. I started creating and adding effects for the introduction’s poem, using “Particle Systems”, “Expressions” and “Linear Wipe”. The poem is:

‘I breathe to help calm my mind.
It dissipates stress and tension.
I fill my lungs through my nose to the count of four,
hold for the count of eight,
and release to the count of four.
As I release my breath, it liberates me from my fears.
It evaporates stress,
defuses anger,
decomposes sadness,
and resolves the frustration of being unable to solve a problem.’

We watched War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko by Dave Mullins and Brad Booker, Letter to a Pig by Tal Kantor and Amit R. Gicelter, Ninety-Five Senses by Jerusha Hess and Jared Hess, Our Uniform by Yegane Moghaddam, Pachyderme by Stéphanie Clément and Marc Rius, Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, Singularity by Marissa Davis, Un Corpo/A Body by Milena Tipaldo, Afterimages by Mackenzie Duan, Crossing to Ireland by Jean Maskell, The World by Jalal ad-Din Rumi, and If You Feel Terrible by Rebecca Wadlinger as research to get ideas for the introduction, such as isolating irrelevant parts, moving poems, dialogue, lip-syncing an animated mouth to dialogue (made using the “Slider Control” effect), transitions from text to imagery, filling the screen, repetition, morphing and deconstructing, overlays, and reversing footage. I made two breath sequences in Procreate to use in the film, one of which is used in the introduction.

In May, I included my ink breath animation in my film’s introduction, where I used the “Posterize” effect and scattered text. Next, I made a sequence in Procreate where the text ‘evaporates’, changing brushes between frames, and gave it a “Shatter” effect on the second to last frame. Behind the text is a transparent boiling animated texture background, inspired by watching How to Be Alone by Pádraig Ó Tuama and My Mother’s Coat by Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits. I designed a red grass background with a large hole in Photoshop and added footage of the fire in Lydia’s wood stove in After Effects, making a sequence where the fire shrinks into the hole. The shrinking fire represents defusing anger. Then I did a sequence where my botanical montbretia illustration’s petals shrivel up and the plant’s colour changes to blue, and the petals fall off as the plant withers and dies before they decompose. This represents decomposing sadness. Finally, I animated a sequence in Procreate and After Effects, with the three-dimensional camera zooming and passing through saturated, dissipating, layered clouds, which represents resolving the frustration of being unable to solve a problem. Near the end of the month, I learned how to rig the armature’s bones to the parts of my fox head with ‘Ctrl+P’, had a look at “Weight Paint” where the amount of different coloured paint depended on the weight influence on the bone, and pressed the ‘I’ key to add keyframes for moving, rotating, squashing and stretching the head in the timeline. We then went to record sound effects for my film, such as fans, outside ambience, birdsong and running tap water, and played around with them in Adobe Audition, giving them effects such as filters, pitch-shifting and reverbs.

In June, I worked with Randolph Matthews, composing music for my film. I also added inhaling and exhaling keyframes to my fox head and exported the rendered animation as a PNG sequence. Next, I animated the fox’s eyes and mouth closing and opening when he inhales and exhales in Photoshop, and also began doing the end credits. The fox animation and end credits were finished in July. At the end of the month, Breathe was submitted to the Folkestone Documentary Festival. The film can be watched here.

In August, we designed nine different posters for the film in Adobe Illustrator. Breathe was submitted to the Margate Film Festival, along with Sensory Chaos.

In November 2022, I did some animations for the Folkestone Living Advent Calendar. They include: a boy putting tinsel over Cornelia Parker’s Folkestone Mermaid’s neck like a scarf to invite her to the festive holiday fun and keep her from feeling left out; the Crowned Death skull’s crown changing into a Santa Claus hat with Christmas lights as children (named Jimmy, Joanne, Robert and Kimiko) run past him; Mark Dion’s Giant Seagull on Wheels parking near a street art seagull on a house to keep his company, before they watch a fireworks display and the children celebrate; and Jimmy giving Sophie Ryder’s Standing Lady-Hare and Dog a present, which brightens up their colours. The animations were made using Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Character Animator (children walking and running).

In November 2023, I produced three animations for an exhibition/live performance for the Folkestone Living Advent Calendar, named The Trial of Jack Frost. I used Procreate to make a mugshot turnaround of four characters (a grumpy alien picking his nose, a goofy mummy with vampire fangs, a Boris Johnson-caricatured Frankenstein’s monster and a robot rabbit), and did a stop motion laser cutout silhouette segment of Jack Frost stealing a stocking full of presents. The cutouts were drawn in Procreate and edited in Adobe Illustrator. They were then exported separately as a layered rig with labeled layers from Photoshop to be used in a title sequence for the exhibition, made using After Effects. In it, Jack drops down from above, bouncing on the spot when he lands. He points at his name, ‘Jack Frost’, in the title, its cutout-style letters flying and rolling into place. Then his name moves down a little to make way for ‘The Trial of’, much to Jack’s displeasure. I was given instructions on how to animate Jack and the letters. First, I set the anchor point for each body part in After Effects using the “Pan Behind Tool”. Next, I made an image sequence for the head positions and Time Remapped them. After that, I arranged and imported all the assets (including the letters). We downloaded Duik and installed the plugin to After Effects, and learned how to create arms and set up the armature for both arms, set up and saved workspaces that best suited the task. Then, I used the “Shy” switches to clean up my timeline and keyframed my “C” layers. I animated the rigged two-dimensional puppet, added the animated letters and used the “Posterize Time” effect to give the effect of a stop motion sequence, before exporting the film and uploading it to Dropbox. The exhibition opened today at 5:30pm, and was open between 6pm-7pm.

From September 2023 to October 2023, I was at Young Animators Club doing projected animations for use in a walkthrough exhibition named Haunted House Experience. Using Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Procreate, I produced Grincha Lisa, in which Lisa del Giocondo (the Mona Lisa) does a Grinch smile for a few seconds after sporting her usual calm expression; a William Kentridge-style stop motion chalk animation of a shadowy, Tasmanian Devil-like monster, known as the Psyclone Ghoul, who grows and leaps out at the viewer before disappearing; a dancing stop motion Irish spider and a brown claymation spider, the confused ghost of Boris Johnson (a satirical symbolisation of the end of his position as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom), and spiders, skulls, ghosts (voiced by pitch-shifted archive recordings of Miranda Richardson as the mummy from the audiobook version of Horrid Henry and the Mummy’s Curse) and Johnson bursting through the doors, accompanied with smoke and lightning and followed by the claws of a growling werewolf. I also made a golden decorated picture frame using cardboard, spray paint, cutouts and small objects, and produced an advert for the exhibition in which someone approaches Block 67 as lightning flashes and thunderclaps are heard, and waits outside the doors before the werewolf’s claws appear.

I attended the exhibition today between 2pm and 6pm. There I saw most of my animations, except my Psyclone Ghoul and claymation spider and Grincha Lisa, due to time and problems with setting up the laptops and projectors.

From April 2023 to July 2023, I was at Young Animators Club doing animations for use in a film named The Pigeon Theory, as part of an exhibition named Big Folkestone Doodle. Written, animated, narrated and scored by the other young animators and myself and edited by Lydia Hibbert, the film is about the pigeons’ takeover of the world and has interviews with different people in Folkestone giving their thoughts and theories about them based on their actions. It was made using Adobe After Effects, Character Animator, Premiere Pro, Google Maps and Procreate. I made a pigeon puppet for a stop motion scene in which a flock of pigeons (the other young animators’ pigeons) fight over breadcrumbs and have a party, and did three hand-drawn animations: one of a squirrel running and jumping across some Folkestone buildings’ walls and windows to reach an acorn (named Squirrel Climber made using markers, a plastic sheet and a photograph), another of a pie on a window sill growing legs and standing up, and one of a rotoscoped pigeon looking back before turning into a seagull and flying towards the screen, eating the camera. All three animations were photographed in Procreate, which I also used to do an animated advertisement for the exhibition itself.

On 22 July 2023, the exhibition opened at 4pm, and I attended it at 3:30pm. There I watched the film and saw my animations, though the one with the squirrel did not play due to the interview featuring it being shortened before the squirrel could move. The film was later uploaded to YouTube under the name The Pigeon Problem. My pigeon is seen at 3:45, and my animations are at 6:07, 9:17 and 10:42.

From November 2022 to December 2022, I was at Young Animators Club doing two animations for an exhibition at the Chaos Cards Tabletop Gaming Centre. One was a stop motion animation of a yeti and an arctic fox brawling in an ice cave, made using Dragonframe, After Effects and Premiere Pro. The puppets were made using felting wool, aluminium wire, polymorph, upholstery foam, liquid latex, foot magnets for the stage, dragon eyes and glass eyes, while the cave was created using chicken wire, newspaper, rocks, Modroc, bicarbonate soda, shaving foam and a steel sheet. The other was a hand-drawn logo animation for the word ‘Chaos’, with the letters forming from metal, straw, fire, wood and stones.

On 20 December 2022, the exhibition opened between 5pm and 6pm, and I attended it. There I saw my stop motion animation projected on the wall and ceiling, used along with the other young animators’ animations as part of a film named CHAOS!, and entered a room with the ice cave set and puppets amongst the young animators’ sets and puppets. CHAOS! was uploaded to YouTube on 22 December 2022, and can be watched here (my animation is at 2:10).

From January 2022 to April 2022, I was at Young Animators Club doing animations and designing props and theming as part of an installation artwork exhibition called Loops, which was about evolution through time. I did some tree drawing and building constructing animations, a hand-drawn growing skyscraper animation using a light box (I was also shown how to do a transparent PSD image sequence in Photoshop), a stop-motion animation of a plasticine man named Daniel doing a cartwheel using Dragonframe and After Effects (with masks to cover up the rigging), an art marker-drawn animation of three growing flowers, some moving clock and cog animations, a digitally-coloured and rotoscoped/traced animation of a horse-dog-turtle hybrid creature kicking using numbered papers and an app named Procreate (accompanied by a galloping sound effect for the creature made using my fingers and recorded by Randolph Matthews), a painted cardboard house, a painted and decorated cardboard clock, and a long-eared fox character (drawn and animated using a tablet) for a Super Mario Brothers-esque platform game made using Construct 3 called Carla’s Quest (2021), with guitar-and-drums music made using GarageBand.

We were shown the areas where our work would be projected on the day of the exhibition. On 10 April 2022, the exhibition opened between 1pm and 4pm, and I attended it.