CALLING

(2025, UTRECHT)

CALLING is a short animated film about a young artist struggling between reality and her creative ambitions.

TRAILER

ROLE: director, (lead) animator, concept artist, background illustrator (interior), compositer

FOR: graduation project
DATE: january of 2025 - august of 2025

I graduated at the University of Arts Utrecht (HKU) in 2025 in 2D Animation with CALLING being my thesis film. It was an excellent project to explore my role in the animation pipeline; and I finally concluded that I’m with heart and soul a 2D character animator.

THE STORY

The motivation behind CALLING was rather personal, dreading the black void after graduation with upcoming AI engines and dwindling job opportunities. As well as my difficult relationship with my own creativity (why did I have to study art and not something with better job prospects?).

CHARACTER DESIGN

I characterized my creative ambition in the form of a star simply because of their majesty, beauty and as well as their destructive nature (they are, after all, very big balls of gas and radiation).

For its visualisation, STARBOY: one of the main characters of CALLING, was outsourced by my talented friend EEF VAN WERSHOVEN (@Sunny_eve). Her specialization in fantasy characters seemed like a fitting match for designing this magical being.

Naturally to comfort myself within this confronting topic I chose a nordic environment as it is one of my favorite places on earth.

The main characters are based on a (festive) interpretation of the indigenous Sami found in Northern Europe.

LAY-OUT

I created some lay-outs of the environment where the story took place. It helped with communicating my ideas with Eef van Wershoven, the exterior background designer for this project.

The interior was created purposefully more detailed to get a good impression on the dimensions of the setting. It also helped me launch quicker into the interior background illustrations which I assigned to myself.

EXTERIOR

INTERIOR

ANIMATIC

There was no storyboard for this project, only a simplified animatic.

*The worktitel used to be different in the beginning.

ANIMATION

The animation of the production phase was quite cathartic (except for the FX animation). For a lot of the shots, I only used sketched keys as a base before heading straight to the cleaning phase for efficiency's sake.

I used color and shading keys made by EEF VAN WERSHOVEN. The backgrounds were specifically ordered in many layers in order for me to create a parallax effect in compositing, depth and to add FX layers in between.

sketch

clean-pass

color & highlight

compositing

INTERIOR BACKGROUNDS

The interior and exterior of the house were managed by me. To have the interior matching with the character designs, I chose for subtle warped perspectives that bend the room. It makes the room feel smaller and cluttered as well. The colors were based on the atmospheric impression and thumbnail color keys developed by EEF VAN WERSHOVEN (see first image below).

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