A Long Way From Home was my first project of third year and my first 3D film. A short, dialogue-free animated short, it follows Coco, a teddy bear left behind on a bus, as he makes the long journey home through a world built for things far bigger than him — crossing busy roads, battling through parks and outrunning a dog — only to finally reach his owner and find he's already been replaced by a brand-new toy. The aim was to tell a complete, emotional story with no words at all, carried entirely by character animation, timing and music, using "Mickey Mousing" to tie the score tightly to the action on screen.

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The film draws heavily on Pixar's wordless storytelling — Bao, Toy Story and the short Lost & Found — and their knack for giving inanimate objects real personality and feeling. As my first proper venture into 3D, it was also a steep technical learning curve: I modelled and rigged the characters from scratch in ZBrush and Cinema 4D, problem-solving my way through high poly-counts, broken rigs and exploding weights to get there. It's the project where I effectively taught myself 3D animation from end to end.