A solitary dish washing robot living out his life in the back room of a restaurant is enlightened to the world that exists beyond his four walls, with the help of a small friend he breaks free of confinement to pursue his dream of exploration.

Box robots have become a real favorite in animated films in the past recent years, and ‘Hum’ does no less than deliver another charmingly attaching robot with its bout of character. Brought forward by Tom Teller and the people at Frame 48, we are faced with an unusually dark setting for the genre, perhaps aimed a little more towards adults than Wall-E’s audience, but are certainly carefully given all the emotions we would expect from an animated film.

Hum was the film we created for our junior year advanced production class in 2015 while attending Chapman’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. The film was created over one semester (February 2015 – May 2015) with a budget of $2000.

While fully captivated by its two visually animated main characters, the story actually takes place in a real world environment, shot on the Red Epic with Cook S4’s. The combination creates a fascinating world, bringing the best out of the visual effects team and animators to produce incredibly realistic characters. A particular thumbs up must go to the attention to lighting, mixing the real footage with animation seamlessly, a real cinematographic marvel.