Childhood memories inspire creativity for Andrew Svanberg Hamilton

Andrew is now enjoying an exciting and challenging role helping to shape the vision for a rich, new world for Embark’s as-yet-untitled maiden offering, but living on the other side of the world from your home and family can leave some gaping holes in the psyche. While his imported Vegemite serves as a potent physical reminder of home, Andrew has been driven to create a more poignant memoir of his childhood in his short film Memories of Australia, animated and rendered entirely in Unreal Engine.

 

Andrew has always loved nature, and has traveled extensively to find inspiration in it, from Iceland to the Redwood forests of California. His desire to replicate it digitally has served him well in his background as an environment artist. But recreating his childhood surroundings and memories of time spent with his much-loved family has had a special importance.

“Memories of Australia is a kind of little love letter to Australia and my childhood and the memories from those times. It's a collection of thoughts and smells and sounds,” he says.

You can sense Andrew’s emotional investment in the piece, and that’s intentional. He lost his brother some years ago, and the short film has helped to preserve some of his favorite memories of happy times spent with his sibling. “Memories of Australia is definitely a project that has my emotions on my sleeve,” he says. “It's clearly about nostalgia; you see the brothers in the canoe and it's clear that there is some more to it than just showing the nature. 

“Some of the memories of us together, of the things that we did, it's not something that a lot of people know about, but it's always there. And it was nice to bring a little bit of that piece of me out. The peaceful canoe rides, the sound of the birds running through the bush...it's all these small moments that aren't really special in themselves, but all together, there is just this great peaceful feeling of a childhood that I think I'm very lucky to have had.”