Still: Skroll - Marten Visser

What do you do if you live in a fantastical world of shape-changing animals, some enormous and terrifying, others hungry enough to devour an entire elephant (and create a cloud of butterflies from the resulting excretion)? Simple, you record the whole thing on your mobile phone and signal your successful capturing of events with a thumbs-up to camera, just how all of us do in the real world.

The weird and wonderful encounters within director Marten Visser’s short animation aren’t all so aggressive. In a piece of animated CCTV footage a drunken man vomits and collapses in an alleyway, only for the mess to take animal form and carry him away, presumably to the safety of home. Elsewhere, a gigantic Arctic mammoth is creating a wind storm that folk in a small cluster of tents enjoy the sensation of. Other intrepid folk paraglide joyfully in the winds that result from a nuclear explosion. In another scene a young man films himself transforming a mundane bus-queue of people into a bunch of happy, leaping animalistic creatures.

Director Marten Visser’s short animation Skroll was inspired by what he saw when scrolling (hence the film title) through his phone, assessing the plethora of random clickbait videos that claim to “shock, surprise or even will change your life.” So he set out to do something similar in animated form and create a series of weird and random online scenarios, accessible by phone. Even though the scenes are located in an alternative universe, human responses to what they see remain as bland and perfunctory as in the real world.

In 2020, Visser won a €50,000 Wild Card from the Netherlands Film Fund that was used to make the film. The producers are Michiel Snijders and Arnoud Rijken of il Luster. The Wild Card gave Visser the opportunity to give full vent to his animation aspirations. When you are animating other people’s work you are working to a brief. On Skroll he could be as wildly creative as he wanted to.

Il Luster’s Snijders was also continually on hand to guide Visser through the tricky business of how best to use the €50,000 budget.

The word ‘skroll’ could easily be applied to any one of the wild or mythical beasts we see in the film, as well as referring to the business of viewing TikTok or Instagram content. According to the online Urban Dictionary, a skroll is also “the process in which a great idea, thought, theory or epiphany is written on loo roll while sitting on the toilet.” This little known fact amused Visser greatly when he heard it, even after he had completed his film.

Visser will continue working on the animated films of others, but is planning an intriguing new short of his own. Without giving too much away, the project will comprise action and documentary elements, all with a distinct Western vibe. And it may even include some wild and exotic animals, he says.

“It's right at the beginning phase, so I really have to get to the point where I can show stuff instead of telling about it, because the telling part is not my best part,” Visser signs off modestly. “If someone likes it, maybe I can get funding for it. But I am super excited about it!”.

Skroll is selected for two programmes at the upcoming short film festival in Clermont Ferrand. These are the Lab Competition and the late night WTF program. The film world-premiered at the Netherlands Film Festival before its later selection at among others Animakom FEST Bilbao and ANIMA Brussels. International sales are handled by SND Films. Kaboom Distribution handles festival distribution.

Find the Dutch line-up at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival here. Or discover the festival on https://www.lecourt-clermont.org/en/.