Ideals of beauty have been around for a long time. The pressure to meet artificial perfection keeps increasing, which secretly also takes its toll on the pretty pictures themselves. In this unofficial animatic music video for Bent - To Be Loved, we follow the story of an insecure fashion-illustration with a knack for melodrama, who is obsessed with her flawless idol.

This is my graduation film of 2020, for AKV|St. Joost. With this video I want to spread a message of self-acceptance and awareness about unattainable beauty standards.

In the future of 2128, we will be able to design our own dreams using the Dream Machine.

This animation was inspired by my fascination for metaphysical paintings and the cyberpunk aesthetic. It is also an experiment of combining commercial animation with an artistic influence.

“What if you could take a tour through a virtual dreamworld?”

Escape the existential dread of your day to day life in this mystical VR installation, and let yourself be guided through the escapist world of virtual dreams.

In the year 2128, most people have left the physical world in exchange for a wondrous life in the dreamworld. This VR video is part of an installation wherein you visit the neglected apartment of one of these individuals.

So kick back, relax, and escape from reality…

The swan and the raven are not what they seem. Swans stand for gracefulness, their white feathers with purity and innocence. But swans can be quite aggressive. The raven on the other hand, often indicates death and evil, while they are very intelligent and mostly social. Here I played with our preconceived notion of what is good and what is bad.

I was given a word (anger), a soundclip (birds in trees) and a picture (some sort of glove with tiny gloves on the fingertips) to draw inspiration from for this project. This is what I came up with.

Sexism in the media is nothing new. On the daily we are confronted by imagery in which scantily clad women are used as decoration, or worse: they are reduced to sexual objects to sell a product. There are already campaigns against this issue. That’s why I wanted to focus on a specific aspect of objectification, namely self-objectification. This condition mainly arose after the emergence of the social media. It means that women continuously scrutinize their appearance, compare themselves to others and view themselves through the eye of the other. This appearance anxiety is often the cause for depression, sexual disorders and eating disorders.

With this animation I want to make the public aware of this problem and change the general mentality. When you look at a self-objectiying person, don’t think “what an attention-seeker” (we all love attention) but have compassion for the person behind the picture.

This is an animation based on the book “The Ice-cream Makers” by Ernest van der Kwast, made for the exposition “Boek in Beeld” in collaboration with de Verkadefabriek. I was most inspired by the relationship between the main character’s brother Luca and his wife Sophia. They run a succesful icecream parlor together, but when Luca becomes obsessed with his job, their love begins to grow ice-cold… I wanted to experiment with sound, using different instruments for the main characters as parts of a main track when they’re working ‘in tune’.

For this piece of animation I was inspired by the works of James Turrell. His introspective approach to concepts like ‘light’ and ‘the sky’ speaks to me directly. In order to convey the same feeling, the animation needed to be from a first-person view. I enjoyed experimenting with the combination of traditional animation and video footage, and telling a more abstract narrative. This animation was part of an exposition celebrating the 25th anniversary of museum De Pont in Tilburg, The Netherlands.