For 50 years, Amnesty International has been fighting for human rights and has been collecting million signatures. In 2001, with the help of the association, more than 47 000 prisonners of conscience have been released and it keeps increasing since that time. This movie shows one of these stories of basic human rights violation by using an original and unexpected way to picture it : the entire image is composed by ball-point pens arranged side by side. Inspired by « Pin Art » it shows each signature has the power to release a prisoner. Pens is a full CG film shot in motion capture that epitomises the potential of each signature in the defence of human rights. Highlighting that the voice of a single person can bring about the birth of a social movement, the film concludes with the words “your signature is more powerful than you think” and features the song "Iron sky" by Paolo Nutini, Dave Nelson, with the voice of Charlie Chaplin.

Through powerful imagery, Amnesty International has encapsulated the essence of its primary objective – inspiring communities to defend their fundamental human rights

A tale of a human rights violation is recounted through the use of Pin-Art drawn upon a canvas composed entirely of ballpoint pens. Each pen tip is retracted until a climatic finale where they reveal themselves to form a mass of petitioned signatures that drive the prisoner from incarceration to his liberation. The project was conceived through a low-resolution animatic that came to be the film’s backbone. In a studio, all the characters were filmed in motion capture. Once the data was processed, several teams began developing individually assigned components of the film. Their tasks would range from 3D modelling to character design as well as rendering, compositing and integrating the motion capture data into the animation. The project’s unique appearance stems from the development of a matrix consisting entirely of pens. Therefore each shot required that the production’s workflow had to be readjusted in order to process the individual manners in which the matrix would be manipulated. Often, this required multiple rendering tests to determine the correct number of pens for each shot and how they would interact. The project took five months to complete and we used up to 400 000 pens.