What is the film about?

Dark Room is a reflection about relationships. The hero of this project revisits some old photos and start to be hunted by the ghost of his ex-girlfriend. The film also talks about how memories and photographies might not show what really happens between couples. In other words, Happiness does not exist without sadness and sadness does not exist without happiness.

What influenced it?

The inspiration came from person experience, old relationships and hours of meditation one the subject.

Preparation for this film: I’ve been illustrating every morning for 30 min to warm up before I start working, which lead me to another project called Scapegoat. In which I design Noir illustration in 30min and post them on Instagram.

A little background information...

It is a personal project, so no clients involved. What I wish and wanted to convey with ‘Dark Room’ was.. Well, I believe happiness does not exist without sadness and sadness does not exist without happiness. One doesn’t exist without the other, sometimes you could be happy and yet sad at the same time. This is the principle of homesickness, of nostalgia, all those feelings mostly produced by memories. It is a bittersweet feeling. The hero of this project revisits some old photos and start to be hunted by the ghost of his ex-girlfriend. The happy memories of those moments that will never come back, and it just makes the whole thing more interesting and that generates unrealistic expectations.

I hope the film help the viewers make pieces with the above and accept it as part of every- one’s journey. It most definitely helped me!

How was the film made?

I’ve started writing this film December, last year. And since it was a personal project, I would fill the gaps on my schedule of commercial work with Dark Room scenes, it took me nearly 9 months to complete, but I was never full time on it.

I’ve used Adobe After Effect, Adobe Animate, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop.

Creation process: The process was not very different from my animation process for commercial projects. I’ve started by writing some ideas, once I was happy with it. I started drawing some frames and put a storyboard together and once I was happy with it, I started animating. One unusual thing was the fact that I did most of the film on my own, where usually with commercial project I would put a team together that would help me deliver things faster. So this project was indeed intense with long hours staring to the computer. I must say that the hardest part was to let it go, it easy to get caught up trying to chance perfection especially when you are doing mostly everything on your own.