Nightpay is Rachel Fitzgerald’s eerie take on paranoia and petrol stations

For her latest animation, Rachel Fitzgerald spent a lot of time sketching, storyboarding and gathering references — all normal things for someone in her line of work. However, what might not be so normal is the time Rachel spent in a specific location: 24-hour petrol stations across London.

Through Nightpay, Rachel was keen to craft a sense of mystery, and the result is a spin on universal feelings of paranoia through the eyes of a petrol station employee “who hates the night shift”. Through the window of a 24-hour night pay counter, we’re taken through the suspenseful (and sweaty) journey of her protagonist’s sleep-deprived shift, populated by unexpected encounters, moving shadows and pin-drop noises, all magnified by the film’s quiet, creepy soundtrack.

“Exploring this idea of paranoia and the ‘what if?’ felt like a good starting point to make a film centred around mystery,” Rachel explains. “The universal 24-hour night pay window stood out to me as such a paranoid environment. It’s designed from a place of perceived threat with bullet-proof glass and a mechanical sliding shelf to minimise the potential for robbery or attack. This seemed like the perfect place to set the film.”

For inspiration, Rachel found herself returning to American artist Ken Price’s print work, channelling his use of shape and bold shadows to help bring her eerie animated scenes to life. “I went for a minimal, graphic style for the film where everything feels flat, to add to the sense of isolation for the main character,” she shares. Within this clean, digital style (quite different from the visual world of her previous project Cost of Curiosity) the animator also gave herself some helpful restrictions on colour palette. Each hand-drawn frame of the short is dowsed in blue, darkening the backdrop of the film just enough to make it feel like there’s things lurking just out of sight.

To really elevate these moon-lit visuals, Rachel collaborated with Grigor Abgaryan to compose the film’s suspenseful score. “We discussed at length creating sounds that imitate light, electrics and reflect the world of the petrol station”, says Rachel, “even the droplets that permeate the film contained a musicality.” As for the sound design, Nicholas Faris brought life to the mundane hum of a petrol station scenario, “planning the silences as much as the sounds to add to the suspense of the film”, Rachel adds.

Alongside the silences, there are moments of comedic relief that permeate the tightly wound fabric of Nightpay, breaking the film’s atmosphere to remind us of the (sometimes) hilarious fallacy of paranoid thoughts or perceived threats. The protagonist’s heightened state of awareness sees them quickly descend into imagined horror movie scenarios, but reality has its way of always checking back in — something Rachel wanted to make sure of. “Through the film I was really interested in exploring that magnified approach to everyday paranoia,” she ends. “I really hope it’s something that people can relate to.”