Flower Basket

Flower Basket is the first animated short film I took to completion. It was released to YouTube on June 6, 2026.

Work on Flower Basket started on February 14, 2026. It took almost four months to complete. This was in part due to a surplus of schoolwork in the spring and also in part because working on the project simply took a lot of time. I did not get a drawing tablet until maybe halfway through the project, which meant that I started animation drawing everything with a mouse. I wanted consistency throughout the film, so I decided to just draw everything with a mouse anyway. One part of the film (the "dream sequence" or smoothly animated colorful bit) was drawn with a drawing tablet.

This project was incredibly disorganized and I did not ever create a proper script until I was almost done with all of the animation (except for the lip sync bits), at which point I had to record the voice lines. All of the voice lines were recorded by me. The soundtrack that plays for the majority of the film was composed by me. Additional music was created using WolframTones, a cellular automata based music generator created in 2005. Most sound effects throughout the film were taken from YouTube's sound library, and some were recorded by myself.

The most "technical" part of creating this film was the colorful background during the dream sequence. This was created in Blender using a combination of Geometry Nodes and shaders. I first used Geometry Nodes to displace the vertices in a subdivided plane based on the position and scale of an Empty and a simple mathematical function. Then, I created a simple Shader Nodes setup which alters the inputs of a Magic Texture node based on the size and position of the same Empty. Finally, I recorded my movements of the Empty twice (once for the position and once for the scale), slowed this down by a factor of 2, and exported the animation for use in the final film. The colors of the final render were altered slightly to be less dizzying. In the future, I would like to experiment more with using Geometry Nodes and shaders to create interesting visuals.

No generative AI was used in the creation of this project. All animation and video editing for this film was done in Blender and all sound design was done in Ableton Live.

Stills

A drawing depicting person handing a purple flower to another person who looks happy.

A drawing depicting six flowers in a flower field mid-motion.

A drawing depicting a basket full of flowers being punched by arms going out of frame.

A line drawing depicting a worried person reaching toward a disembodied arm with scribbles behind it all atop a colorful background.

A line drawing of a person's head atop a colorful background.