Yegane Moghaddam’s animated short film, Our Uniform, has garnered significant attention, notably qualifying for the 2024 Oscars. This achievement stems from its grand jury prize win at Spain’s Animayo festival. Moghaddam, the film’s self-producer and director, presents a deeply personal narrative, rooted in the seemingly mundane yet profoundly symbolic school uniform.
The film distinguishes itself immediately through its striking visual approach. Instead of traditional animation mediums, Moghaddam chose fabric, specifically the material used for school uniforms, as her canvas. This unconventional choice is not merely aesthetic; it’s integral to the film’s thematic exploration of memory and identity as experienced through the lens of “Our Uniform”.
In an interview, Moghaddam discussed the challenges and deliberate choices behind her unique technique. The decision to animate directly onto fabric presented limitations, particularly concerning camera movement. As Moghaddam explained, “there’s not much you can do with a flat, un-foldable piece of cloth.” This inherent constraint led to a stylistic choice: static, eye-level shots with minimal camera movement. While she personally found this “rigidity and stillness” somewhat restrictive, she acknowledges that it inadvertently enhances the film’s underlying themes and atmosphere, reflecting the often-unyielding nature of institutional uniforms themselves.
Yegane Moghaddam
The impetus for Our Uniform arose from a deeply personal connection to the subject matter. Moghaddam reflects on the significant portion of life spent within the confines of uniforms. “We spend a big sum of our lives inside our uniforms,” she notes, emphasizing their omnipresence and influence. For her, the uniform transcends its function as mere clothing; it becomes “a background or a canvas on which all our daily activities are reflected.” This perspective elevates “our uniform” to a potent symbol, “more than just a piece of clothing,” but rather “a text to be decoded. A manifest against women.” Animation, she realized, was the ideal medium to dissect this complex symbolism, allowing her to “read ‘our uniform’ like a text and translate it into a series of images.”
Moghaddam’s journey in creating Our Uniform was marked by a spirit of exploration and improvisation. Initially conceived as “a fun and amateur experience,” the project was approached with an open mind and a willingness to experiment. This freedom from rigid structures – “no fixed timeline, nor a precise storyboard” – allowed for a more organic creative process. Working primarily with “a series of lines and ideas in my head and a piece of cloth,” Moghaddam discovered the value of improvisation in filmmaking. Creatively, she learned the power of restraint, realizing that “too much material usually spoils the work.” This led to a conscious decision to limit her assets, focusing on the essential elements to convey her message about “our uniform”.
The film’s distinctive visual style is deeply rooted in Moghaddam’s background as an illustrator. Drawing from her experience with colored pencil drawings and object animation, she sought to merge these techniques. The production process involved stop-motion animation for short sequences, deliberately simple with minimal manipulation of puppets or props. Subsequently, a 2D animated layer was composited onto the stop-motion footage. This layering technique proved remarkably successful, seamlessly blending “the texture of the fabrics and the details of the child-like drawings and pencil strokes,” the two key visual components that Moghaddam aimed to highlight in her portrayal of “our uniform” and the memories it holds.
Our Uniform stands out not only for its Oscar qualification but also for its innovative animation technique and profound exploration of the personal and symbolic weight of school uniforms. Through fabric and animation, Yegane Moghaddam crafts a compelling narrative that resonates with universal experiences of growing up and finding identity within prescribed structures, prompting viewers to reconsider the deeper meanings woven into the very fabric of “our uniform”.
