What is the film about?

The seven deadly sins never disappeared. The 21st century simply invented more.

The 70 Deadly Sins of the 21st Century is a three-minute animated field guide to the darker, stranger, and more absurd corners of contemporary human behavior. The film invents seven contemporary sins, Scrolling, Lurking, Masking, Witnessing, Snapping, Curating, and Malblooming, and presents them as fictional species in a mock nature documentary. Narrated with complete scientific composure, it quietly condemns everything it observes. The Lurker simply watches. The Curator arranges its own corpse for other people’s eyes. Nobody is a villain. Each creature is simply doing what the feed trained it to do.

What influenced it?

The film draws on the moral framework of the seven deadly sins, the detached authority of nature documentaries and field guides, and the visual rhythms of modern life. Naming and classifying each sin allowed me to make familiar actions seem strange again. That sense of distance invites us to notice patterns we usually accept without question.

Infinite scrolling, social detachment, self-curation, public performance, and algorithmic repetition became raw material for character and movement. I was interested in the contrast between calm scientific narration and the grotesque, absurd imagery on screen. Rather than create one uniform world, I treated each sin as a separate specimen with its own visual logic. Restless figures, transforming bodies, saturated colors, loops, and repetition connect the seven sections as parts of the same unstable ecosystem.

A little background information...

Before moving to Los Angeles, I worked across advertising, VFX, and live entertainment, creating commercial animation and stadium-scale visuals for major C-Pop tours in China. That experience gave me discipline and an understanding of professional production, but it also trained me to begin every project by anticipating what a client or audience wanted. I wanted to reverse that instinct and make something led by personal curiosity.

The project began over two years as a series of grotesque animation loops called My Little Monsters. They were small embodiments of the contradictory voices and impulses in my head, made partly as a joke. Over time, the joke began to feel uncomfortably accurate. The creatures no longer seemed like private quirks, but reflections of patterns shared by people living through social media, digital systems, and constant connectivity.

USC’s Expanded Animation Research + Practice (XA) program was the reason I moved to Los Angeles. When it was abruptly shut down in early 2026, I abandoned a different film I had planned. In roughly ten intense days, I wrote a new script, created the opening and closing sequences, and reorganized two years of experiments into this three-minute short. The finished film became both an emotional release and a shift from creating images for clients and mass audiences toward a practice led by my own questions.

These seven sins are intended as the first entries in a larger collection of seventy.

How was the film made?

I wrote, directed, animated, and edited the film. The character animation was drawn digitally frame by frame in Procreate and Procreate Dreams. I edited the film in Premiere Pro, completed the final compositing in After Effects, and used TouchDesigner to create several backgrounds.

A few brief background sequences in Snapping and Malblooming combine AI-generated footage with After Effects compositing. I used these sequences to explore how generated elements could interact with hand-drawn animation and how different visual approaches could coexist within the same animated language.

Because many of the segments began as independent loops, the main editorial challenge was turning them into a coherent three-minute film. I restructured their timing around the narration and created new opening and closing sequences to frame the seven entries as one field guide.