An accelerating existential crisis drives a young woman to an epiphany about life’s important things (like cats) in this animated comedy from UK director Sam Southward and German studio Foreal for OFFF MX in Mexico City.

Sam Southward: “ESC was originally born out of a fan letter between myself and Foreal and a mutual passion for original stories, aesthetics and humor. When the opportunity to create the OFFF MX titles came up, we jumped at it as we felt it would be a great platform to try out our new creative partnership.
 

“The story itself was something that we wanted to feel relatable and funny, as well as being an honest reaction to the perma-scary times we find ourselves in.”

 
“Technically the biggest challenge was balancing the work load, whilst maintaining high quality visuals and creating a stylized but detailed world that our viewers could get lost in. This fed back into our art and technical direction – everything we designed was built for an exact purpose with no superfluous additions.”

For more dark comedy from Sam Southward, we highly recommend his outstanding grad film After the End produced during his days at the National Film and Television School in London.
 
 

 
Production: Foreal
Writer/director: Sam Southward
Art Director: Dirk Schuster, Benjamin Simon, Anastasiia Ibragimova
Associate Art Director: Tim Eiden
3D Artists Konstantin Twardzik, Martin Thul, Anastasiia Ibragimova, Dirk Schuster, Benjamin Simon, Tim Eiden, Anastasia Berezhnaya
3D Animator: Martin Thul, Konstantin Twardzik
2D Animator: Dirk Schuster, Tim Eiden
Character Designer: Anastasiia Ibragimova
Storyboard artist: Sam Southward, Tim Eiden
Graphic Designer/Illustrator: Anastasiia Ibragimova, Tim Eiden

Music/Sound Design: Peter Albertz @ Fonty Music