Toiling away over the course of a year after work and on weekends, New York City 3D artist Alec Iselin animated this abstract but very personal short film to consciously confront the rabbit hole of self-doubt.

Alec Iselin: “I started creating this film during the pandemic to express the doubt and insecurity I was beginning to feel about myself as an artist.

“The greatest challenge for me was keeping the end goal in mind and holding myself accountable to complete the film in a reasonable amount of time. Being completely independent, the only person who was going to make me finish was myself. No one was relying on me to do it, so no one else would care if I gave up.

“This film started as a stream-of-consciousness exercise that conveyed my anxiety, depression, isolation, creative frustration. I started to come up with still-life scenes in my head to illustrate the emotions.
 

“I couldn’t work at all without these thoughts of self-doubt creeping into my head. It felt like I didn’t have control over my own mind. So instead of trying to ignore the doubt in my head, I focused on it.

 
“As I began creating these scenes in 3D, I started to feel another level of doubt. What I was making was not exactly how I envisioned it. It didn’t perfectly convey the emotion I wanted it to. I was just settling for ‘good enough’ because I lacked the talent to properly execute on my intention.

“I couldn’t work at all without these thoughts of self-doubt creeping into my head. It felt like I didn’t have control over my own mind. So instead of trying to ignore the doubt in my head, I focused on it.

“I wanted to understand the nature of this insecurity and visually define it. I found it to be elusive and have a mind of its own. It was clever and was definitely working against me. So I decided to represent self-doubt as a fox but also as an ambiguous fluid-like material that can shapeshift into whatever form it wants.

“This becomes the connection between all of the scenes, the unconscious flowing of thoughts and feelings. It is the fluid way in which thoughts form in my brain before I even notice, and then vanish.

“I wanted to visualize that kind of cerebral procession and show it almost as a force of nature leading the viewer from scene to scene in very much the same way that my mind leads me from thought to thought.”
 
 

 
Director/animator: Alec Iselin

Music: Tripp McCalyster