Core Idea: Missing and yearning for someone who might or might not ignoring you.
Medium: pixel art
Outcome: 3 minute hand-drawn animation
Year: 2021
Time spent: 8 months (3 months execution)

It’s a saaaaaad song, you could tell.

My friend asked me to depict that yearning state of being towards someone that’s deliberately
(or unintentionally) leaving you in the dark.
The idea was initially just a lyric video. Lines of text, maybe some parts stylized.
Even so, I was ambitious enough to say “I’ll make an animation for this.”

This one was a long time coming, with the concept born in March but only bloomed in December. That voyage was long and constantly withering and coming back to life. This wasn’t my first project where I was in charge of everything, start to finish, but this was definitely the biggest. I had complete creative freedom to play around and experiment, and yet that seemed more daunting than it is liberating. I got too comfortable without the pressure of time. And when it came to just me and It, my visions of the project were violent, bursting with novelty but they were actualized at much a slower pace, drowned out by how I agonized over every little frame. Some sequences saw barely 5 seconds of screen time but costed me a few days - going pixel to pixel,
frame to frame, line after line. Some scenes saw no progress at all, even after 2 months.

I’m immensely proud of what I’ve created.
But I cringe watching it, and scold myself for what I could have done.

It’s always like this. The paradox of pride and regret, of pure creative pleasure and unrealistic perfectionist tendencies. I’ll always be proud, but a part of me will always nag myself on things that could have been done differently, better, and more polished. Even if I was a creative machine with zero obstacles on my journey to arrive at a final tangible product, I honestly think I would still be discontent.
I would still itch for something more.

Where’s an end to pushing something to its maximum potential, or do we just decide on a destination?
Is there even a destination?

I can’t answer that yet. And I do not want to.
I’d like to live with that burgeoning paradox,
and allow myself to dance more in the space between.


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