Trapped in a cubicle at a job he hates, Jeff the Fly finds a flyer on his desk that reads: “Life is short. Are you making the most of your last … few … moments?”
As he goes about his boring, paper-pushing routine, he encounters several miserable co-workers: a grub crying over a copy machine, a rude beetle in the elevator. Then, suddenly motivated to break free of it all, he calls on his cubicle mates to go on strike — and is met with a silence that feels both tragic and comical, broken only by an intercom voice summoning him to the manager’s office. “This is no way to live,” Jeff mumbles to himself.
The nightmarish scenario takes place in Ian Castracane’s Common Fly, a 15-minute stop-motion film about a housefly who is deeply unsatisfied with his family life and, most crucially, his job at a company that makes him feel unbearably insignificant.
A junior radio/television/film major from Wenham, Mass., Castracane wrote, directed and animated the film, which premiered at Northwestern’s MultiStudio Premiere event last June and won Best Animated Short at the 2024 Boston Film Festival in September.
The film is a biting commentary on “the big, corporate system that doesn’t care about the common people,” says Castracane. “I wanted it to be funny but also very dark — a story that could have been told with human characters. But the bugs make it a little sillier, instead of just being outright dismal. That’s the beauty of animation.”
After receiving a $1,500 filmmaking grant from Studio 22, Northwestern’s student-run production company, Castracane raised an additional $2,000 and recruited a team of 35 fellow Northwestern students to help bring his vision to life with voice acting, art directing, photography and production. “I’d never done stop-motion before, so there was a ton of trial and error,” he says.
Hand-sculpting each insect character model, for instance, “proved to be much more difficult than I thought,” Castracane says. Constructed of heavy silicone, the model for Jeff the Fly was nearly a foot tall, which meant it needed to be supported with a rig in every scene. That meant all the other insects and scene settings — also handmade by Castracane — needed to be scaled and rigged appropriately. “And then the rigs needed to be erased in postproduction, picture by picture,” he says. With each second of motion comprising “exactly 24 photos,” the process of creating the film from start to finish took roughly 700 hours.
From left, Ian Castracane, producers Lara Llamas Guerrero and Elianna Phillips, and photographer Mac Gleason — all Northwestern students — attend a film festival to cheer on Common Fly.
The long hours were worth it, he says. “The final product was completely true to the script, and every shot looked exactly like the storyboard — so I was really proud of how closely it stayed to the original vision.”
The film also features an original score composed by Oliver Koenig, a junior who double-majors in jazz studies and sociology. “He’s a genius,” Castracane says of Koenig. “I would tell him, ‘I’m thinking something suspenseful for the spiderweb scene. I know it’s last minute, but could I have it in two weeks?’ And he’d come up with something in two days. And we were lucky enough to get a group of musicians together, so it’s all live music being performed.”
Common Fly has been accepted to several other international and domestic film festivals, including the 2025 American Documentary and Animation Film Festival (AmDocs). Winners of the AmDocs’ qualifying awards are then eligible to be considered for the Oscars.
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