Alain de Botton's latest film for The School of Life concerns itself with self-knowledge, and in particular, the difficulty that results from trying to understand ourselves emotionally, rather than just intellectually. The film suggests that the former is the harder proposition, but also, ultimately, the most rewarding.

When writing about my last film for The School of life I said that the films focussed very much on our inner-lives, and in a way, this film took that notion to the next level. The visual challenge for me was to develop a shorthand for the two types of self-knowledge with which the film is concerned; the intellectual and the emotional.

I settled on brightly-coloured swirling shapes to represent our tricky-to-manage feelings, whilst intellectual knowledge was represented by a boxy organisational flow diagram. Everything ordered and in its place. Throughout the film our protagonist battles with these two forms of self-knowledge.

Script and voiceover are provided by The School of Life, then designed and animated entirely by me. My main tool is, as usual, Adobe Animate. You can find a summary of all my films for The School of Life here.