Unearthed 2023

Unearthed is a campaigning, yet whimsical, stop frame animation using natural clay, itself from the earth, to celebrate and explore the theme of healthy soil, teeming with life. We zoom down and focus in on ever-more tiny beings that inhabit this largely unknown biome beneath our feet. Choreographed to Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, the film’s characters dance out of Pearl’s imagination, inspired by wiggling earthworms, fungal mycelium, bugs, and soil bacteria. Healthy soil is key to life on earth. In a germophobic world, where soil is mostly considered ‘dirt’, a location that disgusts because insects thrive and pathogens possibly lurk, Unearthed encourages us instead to fall in love with the tiny beings living there, and whispers an SOS - to ‘Save Our Soil’.