Watch ‘Shimmer,’ a Gorgeous and Poignant Sci-Fi Short With Oscar Aspirations (Exclusive)

Fans of fantastical international storytelling, tune into io9’s exclusive transmission of Shimmer, a surreal vision of sci-fi animation from Mexican filmmaker Andrés Palma. The short officially makes its debut in collaboration with Gizmodo as part of its Academy Awards campaign.

Shimmer follows a family abandoned on a desolate post-apocalyptic beach, where a father grapples with limited resources to provide for his family. Ricardo’s imaginative children, Matías and Lucía, live in the shadow of their father’s insurmountable quest to fix the nearby broken lighthouse. Their destiny comes to a head as Ricardo finds himself unable to attend to their needs while gathering enough to light their way to salvation.

Palma recently sat down with io9 to discuss his film, including its origins at Escena Animation Studio in Mexico City, the inspiration behind its story, and its ongoing journey through the awards circuit. Shimmer which has won several prizes in Latin America, including Best Animated Short Film at Mexico’s prestigious Ariel Awards, and Palma has hopes it’ll find a bigger global stage with Academy Award consideration.

Sabina Graves, io9: What was the initial spark or personal experience that inspired you for the short?

Andrés Palma: Well, when I started writing the short, I had just gotten out of a long-term relationship, a 10-year-long relationship. And the reason we broke up was because she wanted to have kids, and I didn’t. And it’s not the kind of thing that you can compromise and get a dog or whatnot. It was tough for both of us to let go of the idea of being together. And at the time, I was very opposed to the idea [of children]. Ever since I was a little boy, I have been sure that this was not something for me. So I wanted to explore why that was, and I started writing, thinking in many ways of the dad I feared I would be if I were to become one. Not necessarily an evil man, just a selfish one who focused on his work and put little time into devoting to his kids and their needs.

So that was sort of the first seed for it. But then, as these things do, it grew into something not different, but with more to it. Because while we were writing it, my own dad started to slip in and out of dementia. It’s not like a binary linear thing. It’s the kind of thing where one day he was okay, and then the next he wasn’t. And that fed a lot into the character of the daughter, not so much my fears of the dad that I would become, but my guilt as a son for many of the decisions that we had to make around his care, for having to decide in his name, and for just outright assuming that he was incapable of doing so himself because his mind was starting to lose its grip on reality. So the daughter’s character fed a lot into it.

io9: That’s incredible inspiration for such a powerful short film. When during the course of making of it did you decide to go for more of a sci-fi tone? And what were your touchstones or inspirations that really helped you pick the vibe of it? Because I definitely got a sense of a little bit of Studio Ghibli there.

Palma: Right. Well, I think that the film that had the biggest impact, which is not as big as it should be, in my opinion, is a French film that’s called The City of Lost Children by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. And it’s a beautiful little film. The director would then become really famous when he made Amélie, but this was one of, I think it was, his second feature. And it also has a sci-fi setting—it’s just a different environment, which for us made sense because we wanted to focus just on the three characters that are in [the short]. We didn’t want to have to explore additional relationships. We just wanted those three relationships to be the core of the story. And it also allowed us to have the biggest visual impact on a budget that we could manage in Mexico because we didn’t have major funding. It’s all self-funded. So we wanted to have this thing that we believed we could get a lot of bang for a buck, if you will, in that sense.

io9: Yes. And speaking of environments and everything, I was really blown away by the visuals. Can you take me behind the scenes with how you wanted to maximize this vision with the resources you had, as far as the technology?

Palma: There’s a lot that we try to conceive to be very efficient. And with some of that, we got carried away. So, like, for example, the fish creatures at the end—that was definitely something that we splurged on, and that was costly in terms of human resources of the time that went into it. A lot of our budget went into that. But for the rest of it, we had a lot of time to get it done. So it was one of those things that we were aware that we probably couldn’t throw as much money into it as other productions, but we could throw a lot of time. I spent five years working every weekend for a while.

And I’m speaking for myself, but there’s a whole team of people, both students and teachers from a school here in Mexico City called Escena, that collaborated in getting this done. Some of the students were there to learn the craft. And the teachers were there to keep honing their own craft into something that didn’t feel like a school project but that could be like part of their showreel. And the other thing that was a big game-changer for us was just switching to Unreal Engine at the end. That allowed us to reach different visuals that we were not expecting to do on a smaller budget and keep our costs in terms of rendering manageable. So that made a big, big difference for us towards the end of the production.

io9: Yes, the celestial fish creatures looked so incredible. What was the technical process for making those sweeping moments when they are attracted to the lighthouse?

Palma: Thank you. Yeah. That was a lot of credit for that, which goes to the designer, Francisco Reséndiz, and the art director, Boli Nolasco, who both worked on getting that functioning. And then  Oliver Vera and Daniella Trejo, who were at the time students, figured out a way of incorporating a whole Niagara system so that we could just simulate small cycles that we animated and then just replicate them on a bigger crowd, and that it would sort of flow into it. And right now, it sounds like it was an elegant solution. A lot of it was held just with duct tape and wire, but it worked in the end. So we’re very happy with it.

io9: I was going to actually ask, were there any challenges that you encountered that yielded surprising discoveries, like where you kind of had those solutions come up organically?

Palma: I’d say the first was sort of an emotional challenge, which was that it was a long production. We have been working on it since 2019. We started working on it right before the pandemic. So staying motivated and enthusiastic about it was definitely challenging in the later years. But the really interesting thing was that we had sort of an open-door studio with a lot of students that came in and did a brief stay, stayed a couple of months, and then went into other stuff, and maybe later came back. And it was tough because we had to train them, but it was also incredibly refreshing because every time someone new joined the team, it was sort of like they brought a lot of enthusiasm that we had sort of let go along the way, and it kept us fresh, and it kept the vibe of the team really interesting and funky and fun. So that was great.

Technically, I think the biggest thing—I know it’s referring to the previous question—but yeah, figuring out how to use Unreal was the thing that scared me a lot when we considered making the change. And then when I jumped into it and started doing it myself, I was blown away. And in the end, most of the shots were lit and rendered by three people. And I had a blast doing that, and I was not expecting that to be so much fun for me as well, just to get in there and light up some of the scenes that I felt I really wanted a lot of control over. That was terrific. That was a really good experience.

io9: Let’s talk about the festival circuit and what it’s like having this short film represent Mexico on a global stage.

Palma: Well, it’s an incredible honor, honestly, just to be in the running for this. It’s something that we’re really excited about. It’s also daunting. The idea of an Oscar run is something beyond the scope of anything that we imagined when we first started working on the film. But it’s done a lot better than we expected. It’s a long short. It’s nearly 20 minutes, which usually means that for a lot of festivals that are looking for smaller shorts in terms of running time, like six minutes or eight minutes, it’s not as easy to get into. But we got into a lot of festivals. We won a relatively large number of them. We won a major award here in Mexico a month ago with the [Ariel Awards], which is sort of, but not sort of, the Mexican Academy Awards. They’re the equivalent here. And we’re very excited and proud of that, when it meant a lot to us just to get that recognition, and now opening the door to this. It’s all incredibly exciting and terrifying at the same time. But it means a lot, honestly.

io9: Can you share what your first favorite books, movies, or filmmakers in genres like sci-fi and fantasy adventure were that inspired you growing up, and how that informed your career path?

Palma: The first thing, the first film that I remember from when I was a little kid, was called La Planète Sauvage (The Savage Planet), by La Mouve, a French film director. And that one, I was really young. I was, I think, seven years old or eight years old. And I don’t think it’s a film meant for that age group, but it had a big impact. And it sort of made me very interested in animation, and it’s a weird little thing, like, but it was absolutely terrific.

And then growing up, when I was like in my late teens, I was a lot into arthouse. I remember David Lynch had a really big impact. Mulholland Drive is still probably my favorite film of all time. And Eraserhead, which deals a lot with the same subjects as Shimmer, you know, like fears of fatherhood. And then I think I came to, like, famous animation directors later on. But obviously, Hayao Miyazaki has always been someone who blows my mind every time I get to see a Studio Ghibli feature of his.

 

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.