GYM ANXIETY
STYLE DEVELOPMENT

JULY 2025

SHORT FILM, CONCEPTS & ILLUSTRATION, 3D VISUALS

ROLES: Art Direction, Concept Art, Compositing

Photoshop, Blender, After Effects

Worked together with Xander Schrauwen, Abel Tulp, Elsa de Swart and Sem Lagrand on this short film.

Working with a team of 5 people meant having multiple tasks and responsibilities. My most important roles on this project were mainly:
Producer, Editor, Animator, Compositor and Art Director.
For the Character Animation (which I also worked on) you can look at the 'GYM ANXIETY | MY ANIMATED SHOTS' section.

ABOUT GYM ANXIETY:

A young insecure man goes to gym for the first time. Surrounded by muscular people, he feels he is constantly being watched and judged. However, when he is met with support and encouragement, he realizes the gym and its members are a welcoming community.

POSTER DESIGN | FIRST TEASER

CONCEPT ART | FINAL

CONCEPT ART | OLDER ITERATIONS/STYLES

3D STYLE DEVELOPMENT

Final tests in Blender with compositing done in After Effects.

Together with Sem Lagrand I worked on finalizing the style of the film by translating the final concept art to 3D. We worked on how we wanted to render the shots with these tests, which layers we needed for compositing etc. We wanted to use the colors to convey emotion a lot of the emotion. So I helped create a set of colors.

Blue represents the anxious feeling of being constantly alert and tense.
Dark Blue/Purple for the overwhelming anxiety attacks. More intense.
Orange/Brown to symbolize trust and comfort which the main character achieves at the end.

COMPOSITING | BEFORE & AFTER

Original render from Blender (Left). Compositing by me in After Effects (Right).

I was responsible for the second compositing part of the film. Such as color correction, adding the rimlight on the main character, basically finalizing the look of the film. Since I worked on the concept art, it was a lot easier for me to composite shots. The rimlight also got sort of symbolic meaning. It represents what is part of his life so in the beginning the main character is the only one with that rimlight, but near the end, more characters also get that rimlight.