Isabel Peppard is a multi-talented filmmaker who has co-written, directed and designed 2 short animated films. Butterflies, her most recent collaboration with producer / co-writer Warwick Burton won Best Short Animation at Cinequest, San Jose, 2013, making the film eligible for Academy Award nomination. Peppard began her career as a prosthetics makeup artist, drawn to the industry by her love of horror and movie monsters. Over the years Isabel used the skills associated with SPFX makeup to explore a wide range of creative practices from sculpture to performance art to stop-motion animation. Isabel expresses her story though the use of symbolism and visual metaphor as well as conventional narrative, using horror movie and steampunk imagery as an analogy for existential suffering. Isabel is drawn to film because it gives her the opportunity to create a magical immersive universe from which complex emotional experiences can be visually communicated.