Orange Story — Shahaf Ram’s seven-year solo animation

Constraint: no funding, no studio support, seven years. Solution: ruthless simplification of visuals, do-it-yourself animation and voice work, and limited, strategic collaborations.

Method

Shahaf Ram conceived Orange Story in 2019 and carried it through a stretched production that peaked during the COVID pandemic. He describes the approach as intentionally minimal: return to sketchbook drawings, avoid highly detailed animation and keep every element buildable by one person. In practice that meant Ram wrote, storyboarded, animated and ultimately voiced the lead himself. He kept the designs "very naive" so the film could be completed without a crew or a budget and says, "I had to keep everything very simple. Otherwise I could easily fall into a hole of incredibly detailed animation that I wouldn’t be able to climb out of on my own."

Ram used iterative feedback: early cuts were shown to a small circle for notes, then tightened. He collaborated with screenwriter Tom Madar to shape the narrative; Madar organised Ram's associative ideas into a runnable story. Ram ran the film through multiple finish passes — he reports the film was once 21 minutes and that he "ended up cutting four minutes of animation from it. Some of it was really beautiful, so that was quite painful, but I believe it was the right thing for the film." He also reworked the lead’s voice repeatedly: "I changed the voice of the main character four times... Eventually I realised... I needed to do it myself." Sound and much of the musical work were developed with Yuval Goren after animation was substantially complete.

Technical details

• Camera: not stated
• Lens: not stated
• Format: not stated
• Aspect ratio: not stated
• Frame rate: not stated
• Runtime: 17 minutes
• Shoot days / production days: not stated

Credits and collaboration

Shahaf Ram — writer, director, lead animator and voice. Tom Madar — screenwriter. Yuval Goren — sound designer and lead on major sound work; additional songs developed by Ram in his studio. The production model is explicitly low-budget DIY: isolate the creative tasks you can do yourself, keep visuals buildable, use a few trusted collaborators for structure and audio polish.