The 3D animated film, produced at Mexico’s Escena Animation Studio, tells the story of shipwrecked family whose father’s efforts to secure their rescue blinds him to his neglect and the mistrust he fostered in his eldest daughter, who forces him to choose between his dreams and his children.
Director Andrés Palma has shared with AWN a detailed look at his 3D animated short film, .In the film, produced at Escena Animation Studio, cast away on a desolate beach littered by long forgotten shipwrecks, a man, Ricardo, desperately seeks to draw the attention of shimmering lights blazing in the sky as he moves closer each day to finishing construction of a monumental lighthouse that could hold the key to his family’s rescue.
But he’s grown blind to the deepening mistrust his neglect has fostered in his eldest daughter, Lucía, whose own plans will force him to choose between his dreams and his children.is directed, produced and edited by Palma, who also wrote the script with Santiago Maza Stern and handled the production design.Enjoy the teaser: According to Palma, is a film about parent and child relationships, told through two characters “with too much hubris and too little grace for one another locked in a collision course that will forever tear them apart… it’s about repentance and understanding that come too late to fix what’s been steadily eroded by neglect.” “It’s a risky venture for an independent studio in Mexico City embedded in a school devoted to teaching animation in a country that’s still trying to find its footing in the worldwide animation industry,” Palma says about his film.
“It was also a years-long art-as-therapy exercise for its creator to sort out his own feelings as a son and as a father-to-be.” Palmas has been working in Mexican animation and VFX for nearly two decades, including leading projects as a VFX supervisor, producer, and director.He served as a strategic partner with Technicolor for the first branch of MPC in Latin America.In 2018 he took over the direction of Escena, supervising the production of a dozen animated shorts, including his directorial debut, , for which he won an Ariel award in 2025 for Best Animated Short Film, among many others.
The idea for the film came to Palma as he was going through the breakup of a 10-year relationship.“She wanted children, I didn’t, and that’s not the kinda thing where a compromise can be achieved,” he shares.“So, I was not in the best of headspaces when I read a short story by George Saunders called ‘Sticks,’ which to me is narrative perfection in just two paragraphs, telling us about a shitty dad that repents too late in life to be forgiven by his children.
I started to kick around the idea of writing a script that revolved around the father I feared becoming if forced into the role.Not an evil man, just a selfish one that put his work before his children until it was too late to get them back.” What started out as a way to explore, and ultimately expunge, his apprehensions about fatherhood – he was vehemently against it – soon took on a very different meaning.“As we started working on it, life flipped the script on me: my own father started slipping in and out of dementia, eventually requiring not only full-time care but also a lengthy and painful legal process to determine who could be his guardian.
It was an excruciating process, where my family and I had to make difficult choices that I often regret when I look back upon them.” “Dementia is not a linear, binary process,” he continues.“Some mornings he would seem to be back to his old self and by the afternoon he could not even remember my name.I did what I thought was right, and the fact that he’s still alive and healthy has given me some comfort, but making choices on his behalf on the presumption that I knew better than he did is something that I struggled with for a long time.” Palma notes that fears about the kind of father he might become shaped the character of Ricardo, while guilt about his own failures as a son gave life to Lucía, the daughter character who also thinks she knows better than her own father and is willing to risk it all to prove it.
The short helped Palma exorcise “stuff” he needed to work through regarding parent and child relationships. “I believe this process, and the film, have been a resounding success,” he adds.“Two months after the first screening for team members I found out my significant other was pregnant.My son Tiago was born in February this year and I couldn’t be happier.” After early development, Palma realized the film, as initially conceived, would have been impossible to produce with funding usually available for Mexican animators.
“Its running time was too long, and in my mind, it required a full animation 3D look to ensure that the lights that flicker in and out of the story were a character of their own,” he explains.“So it languished as a script for years until Andrés Buzo was crazy enough to propose a unique avenue to get it done: he could provide space, equipment, and fund the salaries of lead artists for a studio if we agreed to turn the film into a teaching opportunity for students interested in learning in a production-based environment.” That led to a production process that was anything but efficient.“The production was a constant cycle of turnover, with the studio often looking completely different from one year to the next” Palma acknowledges.
“Some students joined us for only a week before realizing the training wasn’t for them, while others stayed long enough to become full-time professionals, with a few even moving on to major studios abroad.Maintaining any sense of stability and continuity required real stamina, as the project stretched on with frequent stops and starts and a team that repeatedly disbanded and reformed month after month.” However, Palma always kept the production one step ahead of the chaos.“I frequently joke with the team that my main job description should have been: being interrupted.
I’ve worn many, many hats for .I worked as writer, producer, director, production designer and CG supervisor.To complicate matters further we also had to train the vast majority of the artists that worked on it so that they could deliver what we wanted for the short.” The creative process Palma was used to, with long uninterrupted stretches of deep focus work, was untenable on the film.
But he learned how to deftly switch at a moment’s notice between what he wanted to work on and what his team needed addressing.Fully animated in 3D, employs an animation style aimed for natural movement with stylized exaggeration, avoiding both full realism and excessive toon qualities.“Each character had specific rules set up for them: Ricardo’s firm timing and sharp smears are meant to convey authority and inner conflict, while Lucía’s smooth, ‘S’-shaped poses aimed for sensitivity and contrast in emotional scenes,” he says.
“Mati’s soft, rounded movements expressed innocence and curiosity, adding warmth to the story.” For the fish sequences, the team developed multiple animation cycles by species and scale, ensuring variation and rhythm.These were integrated into Unreal Engine 5 through a redesigned production pipeline.Using the Niagara particle system, they simulated dynamic schools of glowing, flying fish, combining hand-animated elements with procedural motion to achieve organic crowd behavior, seamless transitions between shots, and cohesive lighting and rendering within the Unreal environment.
Asked what he hoped audiences would take away from his film, Palma says, “I would love it if anyone in the audience got to hate the father in the first half of the short, and then reluctantly granted him some grace after seeing him pay the price for his choices.Or conversely, if anyone latched on to Lucia’s point of view during the first half of the short only to realize by the end that she was just as deluded as her father, and that her own need to prove the righteousness of her point of view has done nothing but endanger what was purportedly most precious to her: her little brother Matias.”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
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