A client asked me to create a promo for the “48 Hour Film Race,” an annual short-film contest. After watching the madness from the sidelines, I thought the teaser should capture that same creative chaos and rush.
Participants get just 48 hours to make a short film using surprise elements announced at the start — pure adrenaline and no sleep. I wanted my animation to feel exactly like that.
Ironically, I was also racing against time, so I went with a storyboard-style animation — faster to make and perfectly fitting the filmmaking vibe.
I figured making a storyboard for an animation in the style of a storyboard was a bit too meta — even for me. So instead, I just came up with the story in my head and improvised the rest.
I realized the animation shouldn’t look too smooth or polished — that would ruin the whole rough storyboard charm.
There were moments when I didn’t even have my tablet with me, so I ended up drawing parts of the animation on my phone. Not the fanciest workflow, but hey — it got the job done and saved me hours.
Lately, my phone has almost become a full tablet replacement. I don’t even need to carry the tablet around anymore.
Once all the frames were drawn, I began turning them into an animation — adding bits of color, text, and detail along the way. I wanted it to feel familiar to filmmakers, to echo the chaos and small victories they experience behind the scenes. It’s about those moments when everything goes wrong… yet somehow, it all comes together.
I came up with the idea of creating all the sound effects using human voices. I imagined a movie director passionately describing his film while making the sound effects himself — saying “BOOM” for explosions or imitating machine-gun sounds during action scenes.
I asked my close friend Miran Turdiev to help with the sound effects. He had to mimic every sound with his voice — which made it almost impossible not to laugh. Since we didn’t have a proper recording studio, we improvised. You can see how that went in the video below.
Once all the scenes were done, the story finally came together. In it, the filmmaker decides to shoot a short movie in a Woody Allen–style — lots of dialogue, one location, minimal action. Let’s be honest, it sounded like the easiest kind of movie to make… so our main hero went for it.
Here’s the final result — a simple story about a man trying to shoot a short film, which also explains the rules of the contest.
The promo animation came in two versions. The first — the one above — is more dynamic and centered on the story. The second is simpler, without camera movement, focusing more on the contest details.
The other funny thing is that because I was hired as an outsource designer, I could also participate in this competition. But this is completely another crazy story of how I created a short animated movie just in two days. You can see it in a link to a project "Look around" down below.