Animated short film: 25 Years Later (2026) made by Vincent-louis Apruzzese

A cyclist on a trip from his home in Montreal Quebec to his former hometown of Boston Massachusetts is haunted by memories of the time he spent there with his best friend 25 years previously. 

This is a remake of sorts of an earlier version of this animation made in Cinema 4D. I use Blender now and thought I might do better as it was a very personal project for me. I actually planned this trip for real but was never able to do it for various reasons recurring kidney problems on my part, family issues and the pandemic happening. This is a functional film for sure but many of the events are from life and experience from that time with my friend, Jay.  

Below is the original film, should anyone want to see it for comparison. I kept some of the original animation as I really liked them. Most of my problems visually were with the characters and how they and some of the renders looked. The basic structure is the same with some cleaning up of shots and scenes to hopefully work better and I also added a subtle effect for when things are in the past to make that clearer. 

update: 25 Years later remake: South West Corridor

 I spent 3 days working on remaking the set for the SW Corridor shot. Most of it is made from still and video cutouts. The buildings in the rear I drew in Affinity vetcor. The animation on this was very simple so it didn't take long to do after everything was set up. There is a right wing to this set where we see the friends walking as a butterfly flies past them, which is challenging character animation and the sick friend is walking with a walker. 

The original shot is below. I am not reinventing the animation so it's very similar but more natural looking, I hope. I noticed there are vantage points on the corridor where more Boston landmarks are visible so I think it has more a sense of place now. 

Upate: 25 years later rain scene

 

I made this 2 times the duration, added different rain effects and details like the fences. I also change it from a few butterflies to one. 

Illustration: Another look at a mortuary art piece.

 This one had many o the same issues as the last one. Missing textures but also it was too harsh looking and lacked the mood I wanted. 

I was able to soften it and also make the lighting look more naturalistic and bring the focus to the death and grieving man statues. 

Below is the original.

Illustration (take 2) Death as a Friend

 

I was happy enough with my first image but since I finished it I have tried to reopen the file and becuase. I changed computers and Blender versions it was missing textures and I decided to fix that. In the time between finishing it and seeing the problem I also learned a lot more and thought this could be very much improved and I think I had been . he skeleton is much more real looking and I used cycles to render it, which is much more accurate the EEVEE. Above is the new and below is the old so you cna see the difference. It took 90 minutes to render. I could have optimized it more but it is also poster sizedin case I decide to print it. 

Illustration: Death as a Friend

 

Another in this maybe series. Made in Blender this one I had a very strong idea for based on an engraving my friend Jeannette showed me decades ago. Well, sort of... it turns out the engraving "Death as a friend." Looks nothing like this and then I thought it might be  from another old illustration, "Death as a friend to the poor" which was a little closer to what was in my head. Could be I saw something and just associated it with a title I like better. 

In any case, this is an old woman holding hands with death in a lonely room that doesn't look like it's had many visitors recently. I tried two versions: colour and black and white. They both have strengths and weaknesses. Did post-processing in Sffinity Studio and discovered that the NIK plugins now work in them, as they did in the older Affinity suite! 

3D Illustration: untitle mortuary art

 I have had an idea of doing something like this since the '8-s and have never found a way to get what I wanted. I t was going to be a photo then an ink drawing and then back and forth between those until recently I decided learning more Blender was a way to get an image out of my head. Of course now I might do a small series. 

I have a good amount of resources with Blender now to accomplish something close to what's in my head. I thought I would learn some techniques like depth passes and isolating parts of a scene with other passes but as I worked on this, none of those things would have been useful. 

The large cryptlike building behind the figures is based fairly closely on a structure in a huge cemetery in Budapest. The mourning figure is based on a mourning angel statue, I really liked the pose. The skeleton already had wings so he didn't get any. 

I had some buggy issues with Blender that were pretty annoying. I use a Make Human plugin integrated into Blender and Humgen to make more realistic humans but Make Human was missing some features somehow and Humgen wasn't working for the cross-legged pose. I settled on Make Human and it worked out but I need to figure out what went wrong. The skeleton and wings were models from my C4D days. I did post processing in Affinity Studio.