Thinking of You

student short film

Thanks to everyone who supported me during this project!

The inevitable miseries of life. Thinking of You explores the dread one feels agaisnt potentially losing a loved one.

Client —

None.
This was my VFS graduation project.

Roles —

Direction, production, management, non-character design, animation, distribution.

Software —

After Effects, Photoshop, Cinema 4D, Substance Painter, Boords, ClickUp.

Timeline —

280+ hours from ideation to delivery.
Plus the time invested by my other two teammmates.

Parting thoughts —

My team was able to explore new things, I made sure that this project could work for their portfolio. We stuck to the timeline or adapted the plan accordingly. It was a win-win for everyone. I'm eternally grateful for Valeria, Sarah, my mentor Victor Silva, my teachers here at VFS and everyone that supported me along the way.

Breakdown

Stage 1 — Foundations

I like starting projects by braindumping words on paper, looking for connections, selecting keywords and developing a story from there. Then figure out a story structure, draw a storyboard, compile moodboards and references, plot an emotion graph, and so on. By the end, I aim to have a good foundation to brief a team, build a timeline and continue building on top.

For this project, which explores the dread someone feels while anticipating the potential loss of their mother, I focused on visual metaphors of dissociation and an imaginary safe place (the bubble) where the character hides. I leaned towards a harsh darkness but kept the bubble glamorous. I find the contrast telling, because it's safety can burst at any moment. It took four storyboard revisions to make the story work in such a short amount of runtime. By the end I almost halved the amount of shots I had originally drawn!

Stage 2 — Look & Sound Development

Once the storyboard was tested and ready, Sarah and I started working on styleframes while Valeria began sound design discovery. Sound design is usually one of the last steps, but this time I wanted to try doing it early, with an animatic. Few benefits came with it: when we listened to it, it inspired shapes and animation details.

Stage 3 — Animation production

Time to cook:  record acting reference, rig the character's face, texture the phone and bubble, and start working each shot.
Bubble was fun to figure out. It's mixture of shape layers, fractal noises and C4D shaders, all stacked up and distorted. The face rig is always a joy to make properly, following how the face muscles actually move IRL, stylizing the eye shapes, making them tear up. The trail was perhaps the most straighforward one, just followed Desmond Du's tutorial to get the inner shapes :)

Final Stills

Credits

Direction, production, animation, design and management
Arturo Acevedo

Character design
Sarah Quintana

Sound design
Valeria Estefan

Special thanks
to Victor Silva who mentored me along the way, to Nida Fatima for her teachings, to Nour Al-Amoudi for her keen eye for feedback, to Cecilia Cortes for her outstanding support from start to finish, and the countless people who have helped get to this point.