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Snail (Stella)

CHAR-001 - the protagonist of One Small Crawl. A cartoon snail with round eyes and an unhurried disposition who walks the full length of route-66 from Chicago to Santa Monica across decades. The story’s “crawl” is hers: the film is a road trip at snail scale through American media history.

Name

  • The FRAMES team agreed the snail is named Stella on the 2026-07-13-frames-call weekly call (raw/meetings/2026-07-13-frames-call-frames-call.md), alongside confirming the film title “One Small Crawl”; confirmed again on 2026-07-20-frames-call (raw/meetings/2026-07-20-frames-call-frames-call.md). This is the authoritative name.
  • The PeriodO crosswalk (raw/movielabs/show-ont-periodo-crosswalk.md) calls the character “Olivia” (medium confidence). That name predates the team’s explicit decision and is superseded by it; kept only as a historical note.

Character design

  • Cartoon snail, round eyes, simple, expressive; consistent across all eras
  • Minimal dialogue: 4 short lines total; quiet, private, awed
  • Generated as a separate layer on transparent alpha (asset_origin: ai_generated), composited over archive backgrounds by a human VFX artist; the snail + archive compositing workflow is developed by alberto-ciprian (see ai-agent-pipeline)

Story arc (per shot list + era guide)

  • sc01: departs from the eastern terminus of Route 66 - Michigan Avenue at the Art Institute of Chicago, beneath the lions; wonder -> determined; a sputtering Model T ignores her
  • sc02: keeps pace with a world in flight during the migration years; determined, undertone sad; pauses at a diner (Ariston Cafe) to listen
  • sc03: color bleeds from a rainbow; wonder (Kodachrome era, July 20 1969)
  • sc04: somebodys tape - content; includes orbital/capsule sub-sequence (snail in a lunar orbit capsule with Nutella floating zero-g)
  • sc05: arrival in Santa Monica, ocean stillness, look back; content + wonder

Notes