Diagnosis
A looped short film exploring struggles with mental health.
This film explores the difficulties in discovering you have a health issue, but there not being an apparent solution for taking action to solve that problem. The problem almost becomes your identity, and this can be especially true for mental health issues such as depression, autism or ADHD. This results in the ending of the film, where the lead character becomes the warning signal they were trying to fix. This film helped me develop skills in rigging to animate the lead character and taught me to overcome problems in cinematic lighting with limited CPU power for rendering using colour correction.
Sleep
A presentation of the dread of getting up.
Sleep is a film produced in an extremely stressful period of my life and it represents the seemingly endless struggle of trying to get up and start the day. The switching from comforting and surreal dream scenarios to the harsh sounds of the alarm clocks represents the contrast between the world of comforts I would try and surround myself with and the constant underlying dread of knowing that I have jobs to do and that I must leave these comforts behind to do them. The creation of this film involved experimenting with denoising AI to create the cracked almost paper-like texture of the scene. I also learned how to use rigid body simulation to create the realistic motions of the alarm clocks in the bedroom scenes.
Blocked
The Difficulties of Getting Started
This film explores the challenges of writer's block and how it can be difficult to take the first step in starting work on a project for the day. The central message of the film is that you have to start at some time or life will catch up with you and you eventually run out of time. The film was very difficult to produce as it involved modelling several complex objects such as the mobile phones and kitchen cabinet sink combo but is one of my favourite animations to date. It also is my first film to use a fully rigged character and motion capture driven animations for the clock character seen at several points during the film.
