Nov 13, 2023

2024 Academy Award Nominee for Best Short Film: "All My Scars Vanish In The Wind," directed by Angelica Restrepo and Carlos Vellandia

Welcome to Cartoon Brew's spotlight series highlighting animated short films that have qualified for the 2024 Academy Awards. There are several ways for a film to qualify for an award. In this edition, we will focus on films that have won an Oscar-eligible award at a festival that is eligible for the Academy Awards.

Today's short film is "Todas mis cicatrices se desvanecen en el viento (All my scars disappear in the wind)" by Angélica Restrepo and Carlos Velandia. The film won the Animated Encounters Grand Prix at the Encounters Film Festival in England and qualified for an Academy Award.

Cartoon Brew: This film is one of the most visually distinctive shorts of this year's award winners and one that will live long in the memory. What techniques did you use to create the visual effects? The technique used to create the visuals for this film was a custom technique that spanned multiple programs and was completed in the video game engine Unity. The basis of the work is photogrammetry, where objects and locations are scanned to create a 3D representation, and the resulting information is used to program a particle system in Unity.

What about this story or concept resonated with you and made you decide to direct this film? We were interested in visualizing a space where she could meet her inner child through an introspective journey through her memories.

What did you learn about the production aspect, the filmmaking aspect, the creative aspect, or the subject matter through the experience of making this film? Generally, when we watch a film that tells the story of a painful past, there is a re-exposure to trauma on the part of the protagonist. However, with the formal, aesthetic, and narrative decisions we made on this film, we realized that this need not be the case. By developing the right working methods and placing the integrity and dignity of the protagonist at the center of our production, we can make a film that approaches the possibility of healing rather than re-victimization.

One of the goals of this film is to consider the sensitive experience of remembering. When talking about this film through memory, it was important for us to evoke the intangible experience of memory. Memory is something that is reconstructed and brought into the present each time we remember something, and it is more than factual or objective; it is subjective and emotional.