A thoughtful and ultimately emotional look at the world in 2020, “Right Now” is the latest in-house short film from Vancouver’s Giant Ant, written by studio co-founder and ECD Jay Grandin.

Jay Grandin: “In the second week of March, when COVID was tipping over and working from home was imminent, I walked into a meeting room and quickly tapped out a written treatment for ‘Right Now’.

“It was a moment of panic that all of our work was about to go away, that visas were suddenly uncertain, and that… there was no way to guess what else would happen.

“But it was also, in a strange cozy way, something that we were all experiencing together.

“So, I was motivated to feed a project into the pipeline that could keep us working as we figured out what the world had in store for us if the road was a bumpy one, made with hard cuts so that it was easy to break into pieces in our 19 new [home] offices around the city.

“In the spirit of the short, it was also an experiment in a very flat hierarchy; the team more or less self-organized, with feedback happening organically as we went. We were very much in it together.”
 

Production: Giant Ant
Director: Giant Ant
Producer: Teresa Toews
Writer: Jay Grandin
Storyboard: Esther Cheung
Illustrator: Eric Pautz, Rafael Mayani, Hugo Baurens, Genice Chan, Esther Cheung
Animator: Esther Cheung, Sitji Chou, Johannes Fast, Fabio Valesini, Diego MacLean, Conor Whelan, Ben Ommundson
Compositor: Conor Whelan, Diego McLean, Eric Pautz, Noah Bavonese, Johannes Fast

Music/Sound: Ambrose Yu