An award-winning short film explores what animation can do that other art forms can’t.

It’s hard to say what, exactly, the philosophical animation Fulcrum, by CSU Monterey Bay animation expert Timothy David Orme, is about. The human condition, more than anything else, though a more literal description would be that it’s a film about the ocean of life and about rowing. If you haven’t done so yet, go on Vimeo and watch the award-winning short film for yourself. You can think about it as an eight-minute-long visit to your favorite local beach – no driving or windbreaker required – or an exercise in meditation. “It took a long time to figure it out,” Orme says about the project that took him five years of work. He has been teaching animation at CSUMB since 2019; it’s his fourth teaching post, at which he says he plans to stay.

“The initial idea was: what animation can do that other forms can’t,” he says of the film.

Fulcrum takes us to a “subjective space,” to “what’s in our head,” Orme says. It also fully presents what animation can do that no other art form can – visualize abstract thinking in the most effective way. The film features sound design by another CSUMB professor, Lanier Sammons.

While the film tells a story, there is no plot in a traditional sense. There is an ocean that has no bottom, there’s existential rowing through life and all its struggles, and then – risking an interpretation – there’s a moment of illumination that we are just a tiny, little moving part in the perhaps chaotic and dangerous but beautiful patterns of the universe.

Orme started his career at a TV station before moving on to independent filmmaking. In addition to teaching, he makes his own films (mostly short form) and music videos for bands.

Fulcrum won a jury award at the 2022 Thomas Edison Film Festival and was referred to by the programmer, Jane Steuerwald, as “a master film.” It then went on to win awards at numerous other festivals, including best animation awards at the Dam Film Festival, the Arizona International Film Festival and Liverpool Underground.

Orme’s short films and animations spanning nearly every genre (experimental, narrative, music video and documentary) have been shown at film festivals and art venues all over the world. In 2021, he completed a 10-screen installation that runs daily at the new Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense, Denmark.

Watch Fulcrum by Timothy David Orme at vimeo.com/801009844. Free to watch.