A NORMAL AMOUNT OF SKY

My entry for the CapCut Seedance 2.5 Video Challenge.

I am interested in creating worlds that exist somewhere between magical realism, liminal spaces, dreams, and quiet unease. Places that initially feel soft or nostalgic, but gradually reveal that their architecture, scale, or internal logic cannot be trusted.

For this film, I imagined a girl beginning inside an empty school, a place shaped by repetition, observation, rules, and the pressure to become a recognizable version of yourself. She walks into a faded pastel-pink bathroom and discovers a luminous horse behind a full-length mirror.

The horse represents the possibility of escape, freedom, desire, and a life that cannot be completely explained. When she crosses the mirror, the camera crosses with her. She runs alongside the horse through a fluorescent landscape where rain, flowers, institutional ceilings, and an artificial sky coexist.

An astronaut eventually leads the horse away. I see the astronaut as a figure already accustomed to surviving unfamiliar worlds, while the girl is encountering one for the first time.

As the camera pulls backward, the apparently endless landscape is revealed to exist inside a crystal sphere held by another version of the same girl. She releases the sphere, breaking the boundary around the imagined world. The luminous horse survives in miniature among the fragments.

For me, the ending is about carrying a small piece of freedom back into reality. The escape may be fragile, altered, or impossible to preserve at its original scale, but it does not disappear.

WORKFLOW

I developed the film in CapCut Video Studio using Seedance 2.5. I began with visual references centered on luminous horses, cyan rain, retro astronauts, pastel magical-girl imagery, artificial landscapes, wet reflections, 35mm grain, analog halation, and uncanny institutional architecture.

I then created a timestamped 30-second prompt defining the character continuity, camera path, environmental transformations, sound design, and narrative progression. I generated multiple iterations and refined the mirror crossing, the girl’s visibility, the relationship between the horse and astronaut, the macro pullback from the sphere, and the final release of the miniature horse.

The final camera path moves continuously from the school corridor into the bathroom, through the full-length mirror, alongside the running girl and horse, outward through the crystal sphere, and down to the fragments on the bedroom floor.

Created with CapCut Video Studio and Seedance 2.5.

Such a cute one-take!

I created The Red Umbrella, a 30 second emotional anime short about loneliness, kindness, and a connection that quietly travels across generations.

One of my main goals was to make the full 30 seconds feel like one continuous cinematic experience rather than a collection of separate AI generated shots. I planned each scene around camera direction, movement continuity, match cuts, character blocking, and seamless transitions so the story could flow naturally from beginning to end.

I built the project around consistent characters, locations, and props, then directed each moment to preserve continuity across the entire film.

The red umbrella acts as the visual thread throughout the story. What begins as a simple act of kindness eventually reveals a connection to the girl's mother, turning an ordinary object into a memory passed between generations.

My main focus was subtle emotional acting, controlled pacing, consistent anime direction, and a continuous visual flow across the full 30 seconds.

I also included a short workflow video after the final film, showing how I created the assets, structured the scenes, maintained continuity, and brought everything together in CapCut.

Loved the story behind this ❤️ The emotional connection between generations really got me.