I created this film as a submission for a contest where participants were encouraged to create a 10 second or shorter video about why you or someone you know is Messi's number 1 fan.

Despite this being my first time doing mixed media animation, it was a medium I selected with intention.
Mixed media animation is unbelievably painstaking and slow. It involved finding and compiling openly available images and footage, designing each frame of the video, hand drawing over designs, then exporting the frames and rescaling and editing them to make the animation smooth, redoing frames with adjustments, and redoing the sequencing, editing, and stitching process to make a smooth video. I found myself drawing outlines, direction lines, and markers with a sharpie onto my computer screen just to properly line up the different frames of animation.  Despite the final product being a 10 second video, this process took hours upon hours.
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The idea behind this painstaking, slow, time-consuming medium –possibly the most intensive medium I could've chosen– is that part of the beauty of sports is that it represent the cumulation of human effort, something that we're seeing diluted in the age of generative AI.  Hand animating every single frame of this video is meant as an ode to the human effort we see in athletes, painstakingly built to become the best in the world. I think elite athletes like Messi are the pinnacle of this effort, representing thousands of unseen hours of dedication and commitment to their art; something that is raw that can't be faked or replaced.

There's a number of small details, easter eggs, and references included throughout the video, some hidden in individual frames. Here are some things you might've missed or fun facts from behind the scene: