Untangle
3D Motion Design
3D Motion, Motion Typography,
Art Direction, Visual Storytelling
A 40 second film about social anxiety disorder. One black thread knots, tightens, and finally lets go.
THE BRIEF
About 7 in 100 adults in the US live with social anxiety disorder in a given year, yet from the outside it often looks like nothing at all. The brief called for a short motion piece that could make social anxiety visible to people who have never felt it.
I built the whole film around one image: a thread. It starts as a single line, loops back on itself, and pulls into a knot that fills the frame. A short poem appears one line at a time alongside it, so the viewer feels the tension before the film names it.
VISUAL LANGUAGE
The film uses restraint as a design tool. Muted, desaturated colors reflect the emotional flatness that social anxiety can create. Silhouetted figures keep the subject anonymous so the experience feels like it could belong to anyone. Spaces contract and distort, showing anxiety as a shift in environment rather than an expression on a face.
NARRATIVE ARC
The film moves through three phases: Exposure, Spiral, and Stillness. It does not end in resolution because for most people, living with SAD is not about getting over it. It is about getting through.
03 | STILLNESS. The quiet that follows.
02 | SPIRAL. Anxiety building from the inside.
01 | EXPOSURE. The calm before anxiety hits.
MOTION EXPLORATION
I built the environments in Cinema 4D to create a sense of enclosure. In After Effects, motion starts smooth then breaks into stutter and repetition as anxiety peaks. The sound layers ambient texture with subtle dissonance, familiar but slightly off.
The trickiest part was animating the knot. I used X-Particles in Cinema 4D to simulate a thread pulling tight, testing different approaches until the movement felt right.
PROJECT RECAP
This project pushed me to be precise about something I had no personal experience with. Every decision had to earn its place: the muted palette, the thread as a metaphor, the poem pacing the film. The goal was not to explain social anxiety but to let someone feel the shape of it for 35 seconds.
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20∞ designed at midnight, perfected by dawn!