Project Profile
Jade (16) is determined to perform at her school’s talent show, but her living shadow is set on sabotaging her with taunts and self-doubt. During a vibrant musical battle, the shadow drains the color from Jade's world. However, backed by her friends' support and her own resilience, Jade conquers her insecurities. Stepping onto the stage, she embraces her flaws and finally SINGS.
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Format: 2D animated short film
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Duration: 8:43
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Genre: Coming-of-age · Fantasy · Musical
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Country: Colombia
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Language: Spanish
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Target Audience: Young Adult / Teen
Art Director
Mi Sombra No Me Quiere is a short film in which color becomes one of the main systems of expression. Beyond creating a striking aesthetic, we want color to accompany Jade’s emotional journey and help us understand how she experiences each space. The visual proposal begins with a recognizable Bogotá, but one that is completely filtered through her perspective.
Our city retains elements that are deeply characteristic of Bogotá: brick buildings, graffiti, and the streets that are part of its identity. However, these spaces are not meant to be reproduced in a completely realistic way, but rather transformed through Jade’s perception. We want to create a vibrant city where color becomes the thread connecting the entire visual experience.
The palette evolves alongside the story. Each location has its own chromatic identity that reflects Jade’s emotional state. Her bedroom represents her comfort zone and is dominated by saturated pinks, yellows, and blues—colors that we feel are closely connected to the character and her personality. Once she leaves for the city, oranges, purples, and deeper blues begin to appear: it is still a world full of life, but it is no longer a space that completely belongs to her.
The school breaks this harmony, shifting toward muted greens, dark reds, and grays, becoming the place where insecurity begins to take over. The crisis pushes this idea to its extreme, reducing the image almost entirely to black. Finally, after the conflict, purples, blues, and pinks return. This combination does not represent a return to her initial sense of comfort, but rather a new stage in which Jade moves forward after confronting her fear.
Bedroom City School Crisis Resolution
One of our main references for the use of color was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, particularly the way it uses highly intense palettes to create emotional atmospheres while maintaining visual unity. We are interested in its ability to make color an active part of the storytelling rather than simply a decorative element.Another important inspiration was the short film Space Cream, created by students from the Émile Cohl School in Lyon. We are especially interested in the construction of its backgrounds, which draw from the visual language of comics and make extensive use of solid colors, halftone textures, and a highly tactile graphic style. We want to incorporate these elements because they help reinforce the teenage universe we aim to create.
Comics are one of the aesthetic pillars of the project, but our intention is not to replicate their codes literally. Instead, we want to appropriate them and bring them closer to our own Colombian and Latin American reality. For this reason, we propose replacing traditional onomatopoeias with graffiti, incorporating cutouts from Colombian celebrity magazines, advertising, and popular culture, and using cut-out elements that appear as extensions of the characters’ emotions. The intention is for the entire film to retain the feeling of having been created by a teenage girl who constantly intervenes in and reshapes her own world.
This logic also extends to the design of the titles and credits, where we want to reinforce the materiality of the collage through paper, cutouts, and visible textures, allowing the entire visual identity of the short film to share the same graphic universe.
When it came to character design, Jade needed to convey the energy and enthusiasm that define her. From the beginning, we wanted an expressive character, with vivid colors in her clothing and a silhouette that communicated movement. Throughout the process, we explored designs ranging from more anime-inspired proposals to others that leaned more toward cartoon, until we found a balance that worked best with the visual language of the short film.
One of the most important elements of her design is the stars in her eyes. More than a graphic detail, they become a defining feature that encapsulates the way she sees the world and enhances her expressiveness throughout the story.
The proportions of her arms and legs, with their elongated cylindrical shapes, are inspired by series such as Adventure Time and Star vs. the Forces of Evil. We wanted to move away from realistic anatomy in order to favor the fluidity of the animation and embrace a visual language closer to Western cartoon, while preserving the character’s emotional sensitivity.
Sombra, on the other hand, emerges from the collective idea we all have of a shadow: a simple, flat, dark figure. We retain features such as the empty eyes and mouth, while incorporating four eyes and horns that make the character immediately recognizable. Although we discussed the presence of the horns during the process because of their potential association with a demonic figure, we ultimately decided to keep them because they strengthen her silhouette and visual identity without necessarily turning her into a demon.
We want Sombra to behave as a completely flat being in order to take advantage of the possibilities of movement within 2D animation. In this sense, one of our references was Vox from Hazbin Hotel, whose facial construction demonstrates how a character with virtually no volume can still achieve a great deal of expressive richness.
Beyond the environments and characters, we want to create a system of visual elements that constantly accompanies Jade’s emotions. Cutouts, magazine clippings, graffiti, and other graphic elements will appear within the diegetic space as extensions of her feelings. Rather than functioning as simple decorations, these elements are intended to give the short film the aesthetic of a teenager who constantly intervenes in everything around her. In this sense, the artistic proposal does not simply represent Jade’s world: it aims to feel as though it was created by Jade herself.
In post-production, one of our first priorities was to give Sombra a distinctive texture that would establish her as Jade’s shadow. We achieved this through a constantly shifting grain texture, allowing her surface to feel subtly different from the rest of the world. Lighting was also developed during the compositing process.
We used a soft light in moments when Jade feels confident in herself, gradually pushing the image toward the intense heat and brightness of a Bogotá midday during moments of anxiety. When Sombra sings, the atmosphere shifts toward something much more overcast and dark. These changes in weather also draw from the unpredictable climate of Bogotá, allowing the environment itself to reflect Jade’s emotional state.Effects such as chromatic aberration and glow were used to enhance the accompanying visual elements and integrate them into the world of the film.
One of the elements we are most proud of is the way we represented the energy that rises through Jade at the end of the film. By combining a white line with a magazine texture and a pink glow, we were able to create a visual effect that captures the intensity of the moment while remaining connected to the collage-based aesthetic of the project.