Tobias Gundorff Boesen: I’m an animator, so my filmmaking background and approach stem more from visual storytelling, drawing, effects, stop-motion animation, design, movement, etc. than from the disciplines of dialogue, scriptwriting and “live-action”.

I love telling stories with visual metaphors. I’m very technical and hands-on, involved in all stages of filmmaking, and I have a deep appreciation of craftsmanship. But craftsmanship should serve, first and foremost, storytelling, good ideas, abstract concepts, etc.

Most of all I just love being moved and touched, and I think films are a great medium for this.

Tobias Gundorff Boesen: I spend a lot of the year in and around a small town called Viborg, where I grew up and studied. At night it was often deserted, like a ghost town. This atmosphere impressed on me visual ideas, situations and feelings, which I found closely connected or bound by surprising similarities. They all pointed in the same direction… Slowly, these associations formed a little universe and, slowly, that universe became the basis for a film. The film started out as an emotion, not a script, and I just sort of went with the flow and tried to see where I’d end up.

Tobias Gundorff Boesen: I love strong visual storytelling and powerful aestethics which are more than just “pretty pictures”, but convey abstract meaning, stories, emotions, and generally involve the viewer. If a script is the idea of a film, the visual storytelling is the language used to convey that idea.

In the case of “Ghost”, I looked to the aestethics of directors such as Chris Cunningham, Martin De Thurah, Tim Burton, Lynch, Von Trier, and other visceral directors renowned for involving the audience’s senses. But mostly my inspiration was Viborg, as I experienced it.

Tobias Gundorff Boesen: I’ve drawn all my life, and have a BFA in Character Animation from the Danish school The Animation Workshop. Before that, I attended a drawing school and learned classical drawing techniques. I used to do graffiti, which pretty much sparked my interest for graphics and aestethics. Lately I’ve been flirting more and more with live-action film, approaching it from an animation point of view.

Tobias Gundorff Boesen: I don’t care too much about format. Don’t get me wrong – it would be great to make a feature film, but the “feature film” format is no great goal in itself, at least not to me. I want to tell stories and do stuff that I find deeply interesting and moving, be it drawings, comics, music videos, short films, feature films or interpretive dancing on a dinosaur! The format is secondary but of course, if one day I find I have a story which takes ninety minutes to tell, and feel I have the confidence and experience to execute it, I’ll go for it wholeheartedly! I have a bachelor’s in Character Animation from The Animation Workshop, so I know quite a lot about animation, but not quite as much about directing actors, for example… And I really want to step up and improve, so in a month I’m starting as a member of Super 16, a Danish independent film school which accepts sixteen students every other year (hence the name) where I’ll study directing for the next three years. So hopefully, during the next years I’ll produce more short films, music videos and artwork as I try to improve and expand my knowledge about filmmaking. I’m just getting started 🙂