Permanent Collection

Martin Schmidt Captures Panic Attack in “LINES” Short Film

Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2026

German director/animator Martin Schmidt just dropped us his new personal short film LINES – a minimalist yet intense collision of sound and motion inspired by animation pioneers Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger.

Martin Schmidt: “After many years of developing narrative TV and cinema projects for clients, I felt the urgent need to return to the roots of visual music.

“The film visualizes the visceral experience of a panic attack. It explores the breaking point of tension and how the collapse of rigid boundaries, whether in a burnout state or in a polarized society, can finally lead to peace.

“The main challenge was to create a nervous, vibrating aesthetic that feels alive. My background is in 3D character animation, and I really wanted to focus on making these colors feel like characters fighting for their lives.

“We didn’t want to just add sound to the picture. Instead, the film was created in an intense iterative loop between myself and the sound team.”

“Contrary to what it might look like, nothing in LINES is driven by audio-reactive plugins or generative algorithms. Everything is hand-animated in Autodesk Maya. I built a custom rig to control the specific ‘nervousness’ of the borderlines between the color fields and then manually synchronized the movement to the breathing and the tension in the sound design, frame by frame.

“The sound design followed the same microscopic precision. We didn’t want to just add sound to the picture. Instead, the film was created in an intense iterative loop between myself and the sound team.

“The guiding motif is the human breath, which serves as a, sometimes heavily transformed, sound source throughout the film. Just as contrasting colors collide, different sonic worlds clash here as well.”