Shahaf Ram’s seven-year animated space opera, Orange Story

Who he is

Shahaf Ram is an Israeli animator and director who, according to Directors Notes, spent seven years making the short Orange Story almost single‑handedly and without institutional funding. He’s someone worth knowing for the way he turns large, mythic settings into intimate emotional stories.

What the work is

Orange Story is a compact space opera about a heartbroken astronaut who crash‑lands on an alien planet and must abandon his mission to save humanity. Conceived in 2019 as the first episode of a proposed 12‑part series, the film folds themes of loneliness, heartbreak and masculinity into a deceptively simple visual language.

How it was made

Ram told Directors Notes he began the project after subletting a room in Paris in 2019, and that most of the animation was produced during the COVID pandemic. He worked largely alone, eventually bringing in screenwriter Tom Madar to help shape the script and collaborating with sound designer and composer Yuval Goren on the film’s dense sound world. Ram also recorded multiple voices himself and reworked the film repeatedly — at one stage cutting four minutes of animation and changing the lead voice four times.

“I wanted to make one film where, when people watched it, I would really feel that they were seeing something very clean and authentic from me,” Ram told Directors Notes.

He describes keeping the visuals deliberately naive and simple so the solo production could stay manageable, while relying on close feedback from a small circle of collaborators and testers during the long edit process.

Following the film’s recent online release, Directors Notes revisited Ram to discuss the journey. The piece names Tom Madar and Yuval Goren among the credited collaborators.

Orange Story is out online now; read the Directors Notes feature to see the film and learn more about Ram’s work.