NO TURN ON RED (2025)

mixed media animated short film

The full video is currently privated on my Vimeo account. If you would like the link,PLEASE REACH OUT!I'm happy to share the final product.

No Turn on Red is a 10-minute-long mixed media animated short film that made its public debut in the screening Imagikinesis, shown at The Byrd Theater in Richmond, Virginia in 2025. Using a blend of acrylic paint and digital character animation, it aims to explore identity in relation to one’s heritage and sense of purpose. How are people’s identities defined outside of the things that they do? The things that they feel obligated to do? How are their identities defined outside of their history and their obligation to it? Or are the makeup of their identities dependent on these factors? In an attempt to answer these questions, the post-apocalyptic narrative follows the existential journey of Accel Jr., the last remaining creature residing in the traffic lights. His job is to turn the lights on and off, but in a world where humans have ceased to exist, do his contributions to the lights matter anymore?

RESEARCH AND EXPLORATION

The narrative concept of No Turn on Red sprung into existence about a year before I even started thinking about my thesis. I was going through an art block and just had the urge to create something, so as I walked down street of my city-based university campus, I thought, "I will create a story based on the very next thing I look at." And lo and behold, I was at a crosswalk and looked up at the traffic lights hanging above.

What on earth could I do with traffic lights? I've always adored miniatures, especially as a child when my imagination could roam free. It felt inevitable that I would one day find obsession in the creativity and resourcefulness of The Borrowers and have that world stick with me all these years later. As such, it seemed only natural that my next thought would be, "What if there were little people living in the stoplights?"

And so the idea had stuck with me, marinating, until the time came for my senior thesis. Initially, whenever I thought and pondered and dreamed of this story, I imagined something a lot more fun and easy-going, simply exploring the world-building and implications of these creatures living in and controlling our traffic lights: Maybe the wires could act as miniature roads that the creatures could use to travel. The poles could contain elevators. What if each individual light contained an entire city of people?

However, I realized that I did want to tell a story.

Throughout my undergraduate experience, I found solace in exploring the concept of identity. In any aspect that I could. Whether that be as lost 20-something-year-old unsure of what she would make of her life, a Chinese-American with heavily Westernized values, or as an individual who couldn't see her purpose outside of how she served others. As such, it seemed only fitting that I combine this exploration with this concept that has been stuck in my brain for so long, using this as an opportunity to focus on my latest existential crisis: identity as it relates to my sense of obligation to my heritage and my sense of purpose in society.

Much of my research for this concept was simply reflecting on my own identity: How do I react to the relationships in my life and how do I allow them to define my self-perception?

Once I had these ponderings and questions laid out for me, I could begin to develop a script and story. And although I was at first unsure of how to portray this concept of identity and meld it with this world, I knew what to do once the question entered my mind, "What if this took place during the apocalypse?"

From there, everything seemed to fall into place.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Because this character was going to live within traffic lights, I thought it would be funny if he was red-green color blind. There was no way to incorporate this into the narrative that I was writing, but it drove the character design. I played around with the idea of creating a human character, similar to The Secret World of Arriety (2012) (which is also inspired by The Borrowers), but I knew that this would not be feasible to animate for the time frame that I had.

As such, I was looking for more simple and stylized sources of inspiration to draw from to create my character (who I have named "Accel Jr."). When I came up with the idea that he would be colorblind, I looked into the biological components that caused colorblindness, leading me to illustrations of cones.

Here, various iterations of how I tried to break down the basic shapes I found in these cones to create Accel Jr. can be seen.

Character turnaround for Accel Jr.

BACKGROUNDS

It was important to me that everything be very textured. In context of the narrative, it makes the world feel almost as if we're seeing the world through Accel Jr.'s eyes as a tiny creature. When starting this process, I established the foundation of my backgrounds using acrylic paint on canvas and chalk pastels. All of these elements were further rendered when composited into my backgrounds.

Once I had all of my hand-painted elements, I brought everything into Photoshop to assemble and render, utilizing some of the miscellaneous painterly textures that came out of the process, as well as finding and modifying PNGs that I found online.

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