Guy de Maupassant’s classic 1883 short story “The Piece of String” finds a new audience among Gen Z students with help from this concise animated version by Cape Town studio We Are Batch for education technology platform Nearpod.

We Are Batch founder/CD Daniéla de Lange: “The film’s intention is to create a compelling overview of key moments of the story in order to excite high school students about reading the tale. What made this project incredibly fun was that we had full creative autonomy. This allows us to try new styles and play a little bit more.

“The full film is a full three and a half minutes, so we had to be smart about how we paced ourselves in order to achieve a piece that was consistent throughout. Something that we found challenging during this piece was maintaining our stamina, it was a big lift in a short frame of time.
 

“What made this project incredibly fun was that we had full creative autonomy. This allows us to try new styles and play a little bit more.”

 
“We knew that was going to be a roadblock, so we decided to keep the animation simple and let the illustrations do most of the heavy lifting. It is often valuable during a project like this to choose your star and your ‘supporting act’ in order to deliver a final product that your entire team can be proud of.

“Planning is key, and that’s why we made sure to put in the work early on. The scale of this project required us to have a really detailed and cleaned-up storyboard so we could jump straight into illustrating as soon as the planning, structure, and concepts of the frames were signed off.

“Our approach to the project was a structured grid layout in order to introduce new information, text, and characters. We really enjoy the simple vector styles that are quirky, often off-beat, and somewhat awkward. We hope that students will resonate with the old tale a little easier, because of our modern take on the book.”
 
 

 
Client: Nearpod

Production: We Are Batch
Creative Director: Lené van Heerden
Art Director: Viola Choe Hunter
Storyboard/animatic artist: Lené van Heerden
Illustrator: Viola Chloe Hunter, Lené van Heerden
Animator: Lené van Heerden, Daniéla De Lange