Rob Munday

A young boy, an identity crisis, a journey of discovery. On the surface, Daniel Quirke’s NFTS grad film, The Song of a Lost Boy, sounds like a fairly regular short film, but it won’t take long for you to discover this surreal stop-motion is anything but ordinary. Following a young choir boy who loses his heavenly voice and joins a band of wandering, musical nomads, Quirke combines waxy characters and barren landscapes to create a film quite unlike anything I’ve seen before.

The narrative of The Song of a Lost Boy is certainly a strange one, but it’s also weirdly relatable and with that in mind, it came as no real surprise when Quirke shared with us how the story originated from his own personal experiences. “I’ve never been a choir boy myself but have grown up in a religious family and so have always had tensions to do with faith – whether I had it or not, fearing rejection of people because I’m religious and then fearing disappointing others if I wasn’t religious enough”, the filmmaker explains.

Adding that he had to embark on his own voyage of “self acceptance/discovery”, Quirke openly shares that his own fear of not being accepted was also a huge motivation behind that story. Explaining that although he’s always tried to be adaptable throughout his life, he always wanted to “find a place of acceptance and strength within myself where I could simply be who I am without worrying what other people think of me”. Making The Song of a Lost Boy was part of Quirke’s journey.

The Song of a Lost Boy is centred a young choirboy who decides to leave the comfort of his community.

Discussing these idea with writer, Bríd Arnstein, and producer, Jamie MacDonald, the trio took these themes and shaped them into a narrative centred around a choirboy on the cusp of puberty, as they believed it was “a beautiful metaphor for the loss of faith”. Recognising that a simple storyline based around this young vocalist wasn’t novel enough, they took his character and his situation and positioned it within a unusual landscape where musical outcasts travel the lands in Mad Max style caravan.

With their unexpected storyline set, Quirke set out to bring it to life through an equally unconventional animation approach – wax puppets. Initially deciding to use the malleable material because of a “desire to melt wax puppets”, believing it would add “tension and jeopardy” to a film set in the desert, the director soon realised that completely liquifying his characters was too complicated, but stuck with wax because he liked how they became “soft and shiny” under the studio lighting.

Quirke employed wax characters in his production as he liked how they reacted to hot lights and picked up dirt throughout production.

“We would stroke the puppets each frame producing this ‘boiling’ effect that made the characters constantly feel alive even if they weren’t moving”, Quirke explains. “In the bonfire scene, we had a powerful light to produce the fire light which would get quite hot so puppets did actually start to melt a little which was quite fun visually even if it did make animating a little tricky at times! I also really liked how wax picks up a lot of dirt because it’s quite sticky and as we shot the film pretty much chronologically, physically it adds a sense that the main character has been on an actual journey which shows in his clothes and skin.”

The aesthetic is certainly effective, as despite the surreal nature of both the story and the visuals, there’s an immersive nature to the short that truly immerses you in its world. And we’re not the only ones to think so, as The Song of a Lost Boy screened in Stuttgart, Zagreb & more and picked up two RTS Student Television Awards and a BAFTA-nomination in 2021. It’s another impressive animation from the National Film and Television School to add to our collection and one I’m delighted to feature on SotW.