Intrusos da Memória
Start Date: September 2021
Project Length: 11 months
Team Size: 1 member
My Role: Complete responsibility over pre-production, production and post-production
Used Tools: Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop, After Effects, Adobe Premiere
Synopsis: Miles wakes from a nightmare and experiences a series of hallucinations in his home. After a confrontation with an intruder and a violent escalation, he discovers the intruder is connected to his visions. The film tracks his mental breakdown, medication, and the lingering corruption of his reality.
Description:
This was the most demanding project I had taken on up to that point: I balanced regular classes, a three month internship, and an ERASMUS program while producing the entire animation myself. The central theme is Adaptation, specifically, a person’s struggle to process the death of a friend and the resulting psychological fallout. Although intended to depict PTSD, the protagonist’s decline is also suposed to read like an acute, exaggerated psychotic episode in parts of the film.
Production was done primarily in Photoshop (animation), with compositing and lighting in After Effects and sound mixing in Premiere Pro. Some standout sequences include the home attack and a panoramic forest clearing populated with soldiers, a helicopter, and a plane. In hindsight I would make the narrative beats clearer, a slower, more gradual erosion of Miles’s grip on reality would improve emotional clarity, but the project taught me a great deal about workflow, scaling an animation project, and time management under pressure.
Final Thoughts
Process Description: Creating this animation was my first deep dive into Adobe workflows. The project schedule split across academic terms forced me to adapt to longer production cycles; pre-production occupied the first term while production spilled into the subsequent terms. Managing that workload improved my time management for later projects.
Problems: The main issues were sound design (especially equalization) and some character design decisions that complicated animation.
World Building
World Building: The film is set in an alternative universe where a prolonged conflict erupts in Europe, beginning in the late 1970s and ending in the early 1990s. Because of its length, the war shows a blend of technologies and uniforms from different eras, modern helicopters, old rifles, and WWII-era planes coexist in the same space.
Characters: The two central characters are soldiers whose bond resembles brotherhood. Their shared history anchors the emotional core of the story. Miles, the main character, expresses his trauma and coping mechanisms through visual details such as corrupted memories of fellow soldiers’ faces, reliance on alcohol and cigarettes, and a persistent pill bottle. His friend's face is also stuck in a permanent grinn, as a lasting good memory Miles wants to maintain unil the very end, even when he shoots him.