Counting heartbeats

Normally we celebrate our offspring’s milestones – first steps, first day at school, first job – but with the life expectancy of Duchenne victims shortened to the late twenties or early thirties, parents struggle to celebrate as their child grows, knowing that every step forward is a step closer to their body failing them. 

Finch director Kyra Bartley has directed a very moving film about the condition, which mainly affects boys and is the most common muscle disease in children. 

Titled Heartbeat, the film tells the story of a young boy’s development expressed in a mother’s poetic voiceover: “In the moment between your first and second heartbeat I finally understood time; I felt its forward march… time split your face into its first smile.”

The exquisite painterly look of the film was achieved with traditional cell animation created by a team of artists working collaboratively across Spain, Vietnam, Russia and Australia. Each of the more than 1400 frames were painstakingly drawn by hand in Procreate on an iPad, then assembled back together in After Effects for finishing, resulting in an aesthetic that would otherwise have only been possible through an analog paint-on-paper approach.