director: Jola Kudela
music: Poppy Acroyd
label: One Little Indian Records
photos: Maciej Kozlowski & Jola Kudela
edit: Jola Kudela
edit radio cut: Aga Gronowicz (ORKA)
CGI & Online: Jola Kudela
production support: Agnieszka Lesiewicz
production: One Eyed Pixel, Eikonos, Feisty Frog Production

A three minute UK film, TRAINS is utterly gorgeous to behold. Spectacular natural vistas are animated through the energy of music. As pebbles vibrate off the ground, being acted on by beautiful music, we are hit over and over again with breathtaking moment after breath taking moment- mountains, streams, train tracks against trees…only to discover these vista exist within a piano being played. What does TRAINS tell us? That music acts as both a journey and a key. It unlocks us to a world with a deeper appreciation of nature, and it takes us on a journey through it. In this bright and highly polished visual metaphor of a piece, music acts as the DNA of the cinematic story, binding together the visual images and giving them context. The world of the cinematic story is generated by the music and created within it. TRAINS is simply beautiful to watch. Boasting high production value and beautiful composition, do not miss TRAINS, it is stunning.
Review by Kierston Drier

_____________________________
Everything is a form of vibration,
One needs to hear it and transform it into music
The world is a piano and the piano is the world
The musician becomes the creator of the world
Poppy Ackroyd is a British post-classical composer.
Her main instruments are the piano and the violin, but she doesn’t treat them in a classical way.
She creates her pieces by sampling sounds, beats and rhythms she generates by tapping the housing and strings of her instruments. She loops and records them, successively adding further layers of sound, until a new orchestral space is achieved. She completes this by adding the clean sound of a classical piano.This process has inspired the narration of my film.
The world is seen as a vibration, and everything in it is seen as rhythm and repetition.
Nature pulsates, creating a transcendental pulse.
Poppy, as an artisan, responds to the rhythm or creates it herself.
Both worlds - elements of nature and the space within her instrument - coexist and filter through each other. This coexistence is reflected in the picture. Life is a journey and the strings, just like railway tracks, mark the direction. The world is enclosed in the piano, and the piano becomes the world.
The world vanishes when Poppy stops playing.


The film has received a number of prizes and was shown at many short film festivals around the world.

AWARD WINNER
- BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY in a MUSIC VIDEO - NYC Indie Film Festival - New York 2018
- BEST MUSIC VIDEO - Los Angeles Short Film Festival 2018
- BEST MUSIC CLIP - Best Independents Film Festival - Filmboard Karlsruhe e. V. dec 2017
- GRAND PRIX - Yach Film Efstiwal in Opole Poland - 9 Dec. 2107
- BEST MUSIC VIDEO AWARD - Directors Cut Film Festival 2017 in Toronto, 19 Nov 2017
- AWARD of MERIT MUSIC VIDEO - Best Shorts Competition in La Jolla California, July 4, 2017
- PLATINUM WINNER - International Independent Film Awards - Summer Session 2017 in Encino California, June 25, 2017
- BEST SPECIAL STUFF - International Music Video Underground 2017 in Los Angeles, June 30, 2017 (radio cut)
- JURRY AWARD - Best Music Video - ARFF Paris // Around International Film Festival - screening April 15, 2018 (for radio cut version)
- AWARD of RECOGNITION BEST VIDEOCLIP July 2017, Gold Movie Awards Goddess Nike in London winner of monthly edition
- TMCLFF Award of Recognition - London
- HONORABLE MENTION - Hollywood Independent Filmmaker Awards - Paramount Studios - Hollywood California
- Best Music Video: Diamond Award - 2017 Mindfield Film Festival - Los Angeles

FINALIST
- Calcutta International Cult Film Festival, July 11, 2017 CATEGORY: BEST MUSIC VIDEO
- The Los Angeles Music Video Festival - final decision and screening October 1, 2017
- European Cinematography AWARDS (ECA) - final decision and screening January 19, 2018
- Directors Cut Int'l Film Festival - November 19, 2017 - Vancouver, B.C.
Semi-Finalist
- Les Films de la Toile - Saint Denis/Paris, screening October 1, 2017

OFFICIAL SELECTION
- Paris Short Film Festival - 8-10 Mai 2019
- Festival international Signes de Nuit - Paris, Octobre 2018
- New York City Independent Film Festival - May 7, 2018
- Berlin Flash Film Festival - People's Choice Award - July 25, 2017
- FotoFilm Tijuana - Visual Jukebox - July 14, 2017 in Tijuana, Baja California
- South London Shorts - July 6, 2018 9radio cut)
- TMC London Film Festival
- Experimental Superstars Film Festival in Novi Sad (Serbia), 26-27.08.2017
- Bucharest ShortCut CineFest , screening August 27, 2017
- Mindfield Film Festival • Los Angeles - August 12, 2017
- 401 Film Fest - West Warwick - Rode Island - November 3, 2017
- Experimental Film & Music Video Festival - Toronto - October 18, 2017 (radio cut)
- Leeds International Film Festival - November 2, 2017
- Red Rock Film Festival — Utah - November 11, 2017
- Locomoción - Experimental Animation Festival - Mexico - October 26 – 29, 2017 (radio cut)
- Oslo Independent Film Festival - November 25, 2017
- 401 Film Fest - WEST WARWICK - November 25, 2017
- London Short Film Festival - January 12, 2018
- AFC Global Fest - Kolkata - November 10, 2017
- Newcastle International Film Festival - March 29, 2018
- Los Angeles Short Film Festival - March 10, 2018
- Independent Days International Filmfestival - Karlsruhe - April 18, 2018
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it’s my first solo project that I’ve self-produced, directed, shot and post produced.
Maciek Kozlowski helped me with filming Poppy’s performance
Aga Gronowicz with editing.
ORKA let me use their edit facilities.
Severine Hamilton and Kola Calfos helped me to organise affordable lighting.
Jan, Ros and Doug showed me the most beautiful beaches in Norfolk and Suffolk.
Aga Lesiewicz helped me to organise and finance the project.
This project wouldn’t have happened without their help.
___________________________

One of the best moments happened during a shoot in Norfolk. Some of the landscapes there are moon-like spaces, and that absolutely seduced me. I was shooting time lapses - you shoot one image every few seconds, so one shot would take about an hour do make. So it’s quite a contemplative process, when you spend hours lying in the mud on wet sand. - It had to be wet because of the reflections from the sky, otherwise the image would be flat and uninteresting.
The most frustrating thing was when you eventually found an amazing location and took awesome still photos, and then came back there the following day dragging all your film equipment with you and everything looked totally different. So you'd continue going back day after day, trying to figure out how long after the tide you should
be there, where the sun should be, etc, trying to find the perfect conditions for your shoot.
The funniest was the shoot in Hunstanton where I wanted to have an outgoing wave uncovering a field of stones. We had to be there every morning from 4am till 7 - 8am, trying to find the right spot.
The worst part of it was that I had to place my camera in deep sea without knowing exactly what I would see once the water was out. Of course a few times I discovered after one hour of standing in cold water up to my waist
that I was 10 meters away from my chosen spot.
Another incredible moment was when I have found an old, rusty part of a piano in a scrapyard, and filmed all the piano close-ups. I was in heaven. I loved this “back to nature” state of that piano.
But when I showed it to Poppy, she could not cope with it. I think she has such a strong and organic relationship with her instrument, that she couldn’t physically bear the sight of a piano being in a derelict state. I had to cut all the footage with the old piano out of the sequence.
The most exhausting moment was when we were filming Poppy on the 5th floor of a warehouse, and the three of us (Poppy, my cameraman Maciek, and myself) had to carry tonnes of lighting equipment to the 5th floor. The last thing we wanted to do once all the equipment was up and we collapsed, all sweaty and knackered, was to start shooting.

Technical side:
for the timelapses I used my Canon 5D camera and shot it in RAW files on a motorised time-lapse slider.
For Poppy’s performance, shot by Maciek, we have used a Canon C300 and a jib.
Postproduction was made on flame assist, nuke and cinema 4D. I wanted to have some 3D elements to underline the interlacing of both worlds, Poppy’s piano and the landscape and that was the most time-consuming part of the process, as I couldn’t afford to pay anyone to do it. So I had to learn a 3D software especially for this project and did it by myself. I particularly liked working on the little house located inside of the piano. The shot looks as if it was filmed from a drone. But in reality I took over 200 photos around the real house, used a photogrammetry software to produce a 3D model, and placed it inside on the tracked piano. I felt like a kid playing with miniature toys.