SSF: “The Alchemist’s Letter”

A few months back, I saw some promising publicity on/artwork from a short film called “The Alchemist’s Letter.” But since the short itself was not yet available, I put it in my “Draft-and-Follow” folder for a later date.

Today (at long last), I can happily report that your patience — which you probably did not even realize you were exercising — has been richly rewarded.

When Veridian, an estranged young man, receives his late alchemist father Nicolas’ inheritance (voice of Academy Award® nominated John Hurt), he is exposed to the ill-fated reality that his father built a tumultuous gold making machine powered by his own memories. The film takes us on an enchanted journey through the vessels of the machine where we explore the contents of the alchemist’s most precious memories, all in an attempt to give his son one last life lesson and save him from following down the same fateful path.

This is wonderfully confident, technically impressive, and — most importantly for me, I think — primarily (and imaginatively) visual storytelling. In other words, A High Percentage of My Favorite Things. (Plus, bonus “Behind-the-Scenes” excellence. And you know how much I love that stuff!)

Attribution(s): All artwork, publicity images, and stills are the property of Carlos Andre Stevens, who made this work available via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.