I could only understand how to tell the story by working through the materials. It’s funny because to most people, those seem like very complicated and time-consuming approaches (and they definitely are), but to me, they made the most sense. I had incorporated multimedia in my own design and illustration work but The Shochet was my first real film.Ī lot of films I had seen and admired, especially the shorts, were handmade and stop-motion. I came into this project as a designer and illustrator, very much a maker of all kinds. Why did you decide to mix media and animation techniques? I was very lucky that my grandmother started writing some of these stories down and I chose this particular story because it was funny but also really telling about her community and the tradition they were trying to hold onto in a space that didn’t necessarily welcome that. While my grandmother’s community is somewhat unique, her story is really the story of so many immigrants, people who came from nothing and had to make it work in an environment that was so drastically different from their homes (in this case, from Poland and Russia to Costa Rica). She came from a small Jewish immigrant community in Costa Rica and I always loved traveling back in time by listening to her tell stories. The Shochet is based on one of my grandmother’s stories. Tell us about the inspiration for the film.

In light of AT&T’ Entertainment Group’s newest challenge, this seemed an opportune moment to catch up with Michelle, both in acknowledgement of her great achievement and to reflect on the continuing vitality of film, especially for emerging and student artists. Incredibly, The Shochet was Michelle’s first film - it is, as she describes it, ‘a coming of age story, with blood and chickens,’ using mixed media animation to reimagine a compelling piece of family history. Louis, and Michelle was excited to find AT&T’s competition well-suited for her work. T he film was her capstone project for a Communication Design BFA at Washington University in St. Michelle Nahmad is a Brooklyn-based artist whose film, The Shochet, won the Student Film division of the 2017 SHAPE AT&T Entertainment Project.

Dragonframe student