WeAnimate 2025-05-07 | wam#0061

Series intro:

Every year, Animation Workshop students who are about to graduate go through a process of pitching films to each other, and then collaborating in teams to make the selected films. These films become the graduation projects of that year’s class, and often form the foundation of a career in the creative industries.

This year’s graduation films run the gamut from playful to heartbreaking, intriguing to horrifying, and showcase a huge range of skills and expertise in all aspects of animated filmmaking. Here are our reactions to the films of the 2025 Animation Workshop graduates.

Part 3:

3D/Mixed Technique

The final films in this year’s TAW Graduate Showcase had more complex production pipelines, combining 2D and 3D technologies to create unique designs, challenging shots, and complex action sequences. Both of these films are highly unusual, and showcase a strong commitment to story while developing unique visuals.

Potlems

Potlems is a striking film, both for its distinctive visual style, and for its unique, ambiguous storyline. The film is about a strange god and his flawed creations, and has moments of almost saccharine cuteness contrasted with moments of almost disturbing darkness. Although the film is made in 3D, it has an almost stop-motion richness of texture, exaggerated by the unconventional approach to VFX. Ida Gørtz’s character designs are fascinating, and work well with Melissa Raymundo Lund’s art direction to make this such a compelling film.

Writer/director Alberto Allegri Rodríguez says:

Potlems started as a simple and fun world-building experiment. How would the Potlems, these steam-powered, ceramic automatons, survive in their world? Over a couple of years of occasionally revisiting it, I started finding a lot of meaning in it as a disabled person. These fragile, heat-dependent creatures who would cease functioning if they ever left their warm home. This was my first time directing a purely original project, so, more than testing my skills as an artist, I had to focus most of my energy on interacting with others, finding out how to help make the project their own while still keeping the original intent of the piece on track.

Service Bus

Service Bus is a comedy short about a most unexpected adventure on a travel bus, where an increasingly absurd sequence of events invites narrowly averted disaster. This film has fantastic sound design that heightens the increasing chaos of the situation, wonderfully enhancing the atmosphere inside and outside the bus. The team used Blender to create a “2.5D” film, with a sketchy toon shading that works wonderfully with the story. Storyboard artist and lead animator Sam Byrne did a great job with the exaggerated shot framing and timing contrast that helps make the story so funny. Director Elmer Mikael Lødemel says:

I was on a Flixbus trip to Copenhagen with a friend, and at some point I noticed the service button. It was a long ride, so I had plenty of time to wonder and fantasize about what would happen if I pressed the button. I couldn’t get it out of my head that there was only one person on duty in the bus: the driver.

The biggest surprise working on Service Bus was audience feedback. After a while we didn’t laugh as much as before at the jokes, since we had seen them a million times down the production line. But when we showed the film in the cinema for an audience, they laughed so loud that you couldn’t hear some of the jokes. That surprised me. Next time I will make sure to use a bit more time after the funniest jokes.

These films feature a fantastic array of creativity and problem-solving, as the students used a huge range of tools and techniques to create their stories. They are funny, moving, and showcase a high level of artistry. We look forward to seeing what’s ahead for these talented young artists!

Check out the trailer for these projects and all the graduate films here:

The Next Wave Emerges:
Animation Workshop Graduate Showcase

Part 1: Game trailers

The Next Wave Emerges:
Animation Workshop Graduate Showcase

Part 2: Classical animation techniques