Some Behind The Scenes Stuff

This film began as an assignment combined with a dream I had one night. In the dream, I was running on Tetris-like glowing blocks in a dark void. I expanded the dream into a whole story using original characters I created.

I have my own online video series where I would turn uncommon animals into character designs. My first designs were turning sea creatures into characters. The main two I ended up using in my short film are Ellie the Sea Bunny Slug girl and Sapphire the Blue Sea Dragon Girl. Since I already had designed characters, I chose to simplify and stylize them for animation and make them the featured stars of my film!

After months of work and help from the amazing people credited in the film, we were able to turn the rough storyboards and ideas into fully animated and rendered animation!

Check out the Team!

Check out the people involved in the creation of this film!

Final Film Crew

Additional Talent & Contributors

Starla's Art Studio (Myself):

Director, Story-boarder, Rough/Clean Up/Coloring Animator, Background Artist, Compositor, Editor, Sound Designer, Film Promotion, Head of Art and Production

Phoebe Youngblood: (@youngblood_artwork)

Project Manager, Clean Up/Coloring Animator, 2D Background Artist

SJ Lawson:

3D Background Artist, Compositor

Taylor "Panda" Peardon: (@pandaprintart)

3D Background Development, 2D Background artist

Michelle Brannan: (@michelle_brannan)

3D Background Development, 2D Background Artist, Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Caitlyn David: (@dis_hooman)

2D Background Artist

Elizabeth (Liz) Hughes: (@spookynote)

2D Background Artist

John Paul McLeod: (@flyingshoeproductions)

Rough/Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Yamenah Muhammad: (@figsoliomedley)

Rough/Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Jayla Swain: (@ToastFiend_the_Jellybean)

Rough/Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Skully Gilder: (@skulgamerfour)

Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Kyle Haymer: (@kyle_haymer_art)

Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Seth Portal: (@thenormaldoor)

Story-boarder, Rough/Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Sarahi Montero : (@art.dimos)

Trailer Project manager

Nathaniel Davila: (@nathaniel_davila)

Music compositor, Scored "Ellie Wakes Up Piano Mix"

Hannah Poon: (starwillow.wixsite.com)

2D Background Artist

Brooke Williams: (@bugzwillbyte)

Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Alejandro Magana Martinez: (@a.magana.mart)

Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Curtis Staples: (@capnvenom)

Rough/Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Tyler Stevens: (@tylers_art_page_)

Clean Up/Coloring Animator

Kate Matthews:

2D Backgrounds

Jesus Millien:

2D Backgrounds

Check out any of the profiles and portfolios of the many artists and creatives who contributed to this short film! Many of them have their own projects, send some love their way! :)

Our Kickstarter Journey!

I started this project as a short film with only friends and volunteers helping me get it done. The deeper into production we went the more I realized how much was going into this, not only from myself, but mostly from everyone else on the team. My gratitude towards each team member kept growing, so I knew I wanted to find a way to give back to them. That's when I turned to kickstarter!

I had honestly never run a fundraising campaign. I talked to a couple of people I knew about it and they encouraged me to go ahead and try it at least. So I did! I thought the worst outcome is just not reaching the goal and that's no different than never trying the campaign so might as well go ahead!

The production of the film started with a few months of per-production, character re-designs, reworking storyboards, organizing our files, file sharing, and production progress spreadsheet. I thought I'd take a minute to share our progress up to that point as the introduction to our project in the campaign. At this point, we had gotten a 30 second trailer complete the year prior, so that was also a fun way to introduce things. All very helpful!

Being a director, storyboarder, rough/clean up/coloring animator, background artist, compositor, editor, sound designer, and more- WAS WORK. Wow haha. I usually have a vague idea of what I'm getting into when I start a new project. I had made plenty of shorter animations in my past, and I usually handle every step, but this process made me realize how many other steps need to be added to make sure the final project can go from start to the final edit.

The initial trailer was complete in May of 2025, and after a very busy school year, I told everyone I knew I was likely going to create the full 5 minute film I had story-boarded out, but I was SO tired. I spent the summer resting and working. Fall rolled around, "I'll get to it" I thought. I had this thought quite often. By mid November, I had peeked into the very daunting and untidy hill of animation files, notes, folders, and images that was all part of one project and it would chip away at my motivation to get back on it.

Thankfully, this motivation was revived after being reunited with a friend and previous classmate who offered to help me with project management! This super star of production was Phoebe Youngblood, who became the project manager, clean up/color animator, background artist, and my go-to for feedback on the Kickstarter, promotion material, and the final short film! By the end of 2025, we had totally scheduled out production for the rest of the film and were ready to start assigning work to people who were still willing to be a part of the team!

In February, we had a great pipeline flowing with animators working, backgrounds being painted, and I was getting ready to promote our Kickstarter campaign before officially launching at the beginning of March!

By the springtime, we were already staying on track with production and I felt ready to start the campaign. It was March 8th when I started announcing the campaign everywhere I could! It was a lot of effort to jump back and forth between managing the team, being part of the team working on many of the rough animation shots to assign to other members, AND creating videos that would promote the project.

It was absolutely the busiest and most stressful last few months I had since last year really, but truly in a different way. I'm immensely grateful for the support I was getting from the people closest to me during this time. I had been dealing with so much personally that despite this project being a wild amount on my plate, it was also my comfort in a way (that as well as random horror games on Steam). Sometimes not being able to get sleep at 2 am is a great excuse to try a random steam game.

It was now April and we had been climbing up the chart with our amazing Kickstarter backers. I only had the time to make updates every 2 weekends, and even that was hard to keep up with between everything else. I did my best to show up online, in person animation events, over emails, in Discord servers, in DMs, just anything I could to get the project out there.

At the same time, the indie series, The Amazing Digital Circus (TADC), was releasing their second last episode on Youtube. As a fan, I just wanted to do a quick fan animation to help get my mind off things and to hopefully get more people to see my page and learn about this project. I had been more and more inspired by indie films and indie animation projects and seeing how a community can bring together an idea. And I had the idea to make and throw out a little animation with a TADC character, waving and being cute and small with a popular sound effect used in a lot of videos. AND WOAH man. Now (Summer of 2026) sitting at 2.5 Million views and thousands of likes and comments. My Account grew and I used every opportunity I had to keep promoting the Kickstarter campaign and it was helping!!

The end of April was approaching with the campaign ending on the 27th, and all the efforts of my team and myself would finally pay off with us reaching the goal with just a few days left!! My whole team celebrated with huge cheers, in person screenings, and a dinner to celebrate all of our hard work.

With the final short film premiering on my animation Youtube channel on May 15th, that concluded the journey of this short film. :)

The remainder of May was used to fulfill rewards for the Kickstarter backers, catch up on sleep, and get back to connecting and hanging out with the friends that made all this possible in the first place. ⭐

It was a very long and hard journey but I wouldn't have changed it. The biggest feeling I had after getting the film done was "Man, I can't wait to do better things after this." As my own biggest critic, I can fully acknowledge when a project really has that "umph", just the "right stuff", that really makes you feel something. I feel like this film has the "unrefined stuff". I feel like I have so much more potential as a creative. As if I'm standing in my own little Minecraft cave and I've only just gotten past the coal and silver. But I know I'll get there. One day.

Some of the many cool things given out to kickstarter backers :D

Find More info on this film or my other works on my social media!

Check out my other animations on my Instagram @Starlas_Art_Studio!