"Call Your Mom" — an emotional family phone call gets animated - HITRECORD

"Call Your Mom" — an emotional family phone call gets animated

MattConley

Apr 21, 2024

One powerful quote that has always stuck with me is this one by actor J.K. Simmons from when he was accepting an Academy Award for his performance in "Whiplash." He said "Call your mom. Call your dad. If you’re lucky enough to have a parent or two alive on this planet, call them. Don’t text. Don’t email. Call them on the phone. Tell them you love them, and thank them, and listen to them for as long as they want to talk to you."

Back when we were developing the "RE: Your Mom" episode of "HITRECORD On TV" Season 2, Pamagotchi did just that. She called up her mom and had a sweet 10+ minute conversation in Spanish, and recorded the whole thing:

What was especially moving about the phone call was how Pam's mom reminisced about how she felt her whole life was leading up to becoming a mother. It had always been her destiny, and she so eloquently describes the journey to motherhood — from singing songs and talking to her unborn children, to the moments they arrived and forever changed her life.

All of us in the HITRECORD office knew this would make a wonderful short film segment for our television show, so we got right to work on developing it. Once we had a locked edit of the conversation, we would need to find a way to tell the story of this phone call visually through an animation style that we could complete before our looming deadline hit. This would be no small feat.

As I scrambled for a solution, my mind immediately went into the HITRECORD archives back to an animation I had first discovered in 2012 by mariel_S:

What I loved about that particular animation was that the characters were hand-drawn and animated amongst splashes of watercolor. There was very little movement in the animation, but the specific technique made it feel alive. I thought this look and feel would go very well with the subtitles that needed to be emphasized.

Fortunately for us, Mariel enthusiastically joined the collaboration to lead the illustration side of things, and quickly came through with these wonderfully illustrated character designs of Pam and her mother that came to life through animating a few hand-drawn frames together:

This animation technique helped the production move forward efficiently (and much faster than so many of our television show's animated short films.) Once we had our imagery squared away, musician RyThoJo topped off the audio portion of the project with a score that accompanied the spoken words so well:

All in all, this whole short film ended up coming together faster than almost any other short film segment in all of Season 2. This came as a huge relief because there was seriously no margin for error. The timeline to create all the animated assets came right down to the wire. If memory serves, I believe we completed the segment 24 hours before the final cut was due to the network. We had just made it.

Even with a furiously frantic production schedule, this will always go down as one of the most memorable pieces of art I have ever had the privilege to be a part of. Whenever I think of this short film, I'm always reminded that the basis for the entire project was a recorded phone call between a daughter and her mother. It didn't require a script or any kind of pre-planned outline of any kind. It was simply a natural, ordinary conversation between two members of a family.

What made it so special was that the discussion touched so deeply on the universal feeling of what it's like to become a parent and get to connect with your children throughout their lives (even before they are born.) I think it's safe to say that these kinds of touching conversations happen every single day, all over the world. But we were so lucky that Pam happened to hit record on this particular one, and I think I speak for everyone involved when I say this was a deeply meaningful project to have been a part of.

The cherry on top of this whole thing was that Pam recorded one more conversation with her mom — only this time it was while she showed her the completed short film for the very first time: