Prologue

This film was born of an old rice tupperware forgotten in the back of a fridge. It was gross and beautiful, and up close looked like a weird little garden. Some people found it beautiful, and some found it disgusting ; from there came the idea : how can we teach people to shift their gaze, and find the beauty in things they think of as gross?

That was the base of the film. We then built our story on top of that. If there is a garden, is there a gardener ? or not ? just one, or thousands working together ? We explored all these possibilities and ended up with Shim : a round little creature, its pale skin reminiscent of white mushrooms, with moldy dirt all over its hands and feet. We hid its eyes behind a pointy hat so the viewer wouldn’t be drawn to them and miss out on the gardens, and a little poncho so it wouldn’t catch a cold.

The gardens themselves were based on real mold species. We wanted to show real beauties of real things, not make up imaginary species. We ended up with a varied selection of a dozen different kinds that we scattered in our virtual fridge.

The end shows the fridge in which the mold grew gets thrown away in a landfill. Our little gardener comes out of its home and discovers different, new beautiful things that we people wouldn’t necessarily describe as pretty : lichen growing on old wood, rust of a few discarded screws, the fibers of a piece of rotten fabric.

Pitch

Dubious gardens are being grown in a strange space, and their gardener will have to fight for their beauty.

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Teaser

à propos.

The directors : who are we

Hello ! We're the Moldies, the director team of our graduation film Dubious Garden. We worked from May 2024 to June 2025 to deliver this film. We hope you will enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it !

Noée Butz

I'm the lead of the team. The original idea came from my brain ! I'm a lover of the little things of this world, and I try to share that love in my art. As for the production, I worked as a generalist but mostly as a sculpt artist/modeler and as a layout artist. I also act as wood filler, filling in the gaps when someone else on the team needs support on a task !

Candice Bègue

For the pre-production, I mainly worked on the visual development, such as character design, concept art and photobashing, and later on the story board and animatic. During the production I worked on look development, on the character and the garden. I also worked on the VFX, surfacing, lighting and compositing.

Manon Aprin

During pre-production, I helped with the writing of our script, did some storyboarding and photobashing. In the production phase, I made and simulated the groom on the fungi that needed it, and also modeled some of them. I did the lighting and compositing on half the shots of the film. I also worked on optimizing our renders, and made sure all our shots didn't exceed a certain render time. Of course, I’m a generalist but would also like to do specialized work in lighting, compositing and above all groom.

Léonie Minh Xuân Codet

In pre-production I focused on the storytelling and took part in writing and storyboarding. I also participated in conceptualizing the garden in its different states. During production I was the only rigger. It was a little challenging as everything moves in the film, so a lot of the environment needed rigging on top of the character and props, but it was stimulating despite the obstacles. Once rigging was done, I switched to animating. I learnt a lot during this project, I reinforced my skills and gained in efficiency.

Manoa Tetuanui

As we were trained to be directors these past five years, I got to use those skills during pre-production in the writing of the script, the crafting of concept art, the making of the storyboard and I even got to set the first drafts for the sound design and musical composition of our film. During production and as I am specialized in animation, I acted for video referencing then animated most of our shots, including the character, most of the background idles and the cameras.