After graduating, staying home to make "one-person animation," her mental state is as beautiful as her work.

This article is reprinted with authorization from "Animation Academic Critique"

Author / Yu Dun

Typesetting / Nami

"Being seen" is arguably one of the ultimate goals for most animators throughout their creative careers. Among them, some hope their works and expressions are seen; some hope their contributions to popular works are recognized; some hope they themselves, as talented and vibrant individuals behind animated works, are noticed.

With the continuous development of animation production techniques and processes, as well as the expansion of distribution channels and monetization paths for animation as a medium, it has become increasingly possible for more young animation creators to stand before their works.

Xin Som, whose graduation animation short "Carpe diem" quickly gained attention upon its release in 2023, subsequently embarked on her own path of independent creation.

Nearly three years have passed since graduation. During this time, Xin Som created the single "Merry-go-Rom!!!" for Bilibili's Spring Festival Gala, produced the fan animation short "Dreams of Late Summer" for the game Honkai: Star Rail, co-directed singer Roy Wang's MV "Cosmic Super Invincible Big", directed "PINK TYRANT" for Bilibili's "1-Minute Animation Theater", and participated in the animation production for the 2026 Wuthering Waves Spring Festival event, handling the dance animation portion.

Through these works, Xin Som has forged her own personal brand. Her pieces feature a retro VHS texture, vaporwave aesthetics, and a carpe diem core that stand out uniquely in the online world.

How did Xin Som achieve a rapid transformation from animation graduate to independent animation director in these three years?

What insights can her personal creative experience offer to animation newcomers about to enter the industry?

Today, we are honored to invite Xin Som to start from her graduation season and talk with us about her creative journey over the past three years and her future plans.

01​

"Decisions Come Only After Opportunities Arrive"​

Animation is sometimes a vessel for stories, and sometimes an outlet for emotions. Often, audiences simply seek the most direct, primal resonance in a work.

Xin Som's graduation short "Carpe diem" is exactly that kind of piece.

It does not present a clear, complete story, but its imagery, filled with rich pop culture symbols coupled with infectious vaporwave music, perfectly aligns with young people's beautiful imagination of youth and the economic upswing of the millennium.

The warm reception of her graduation work on Bilibili far exceeded Xin Som's expectations, and she hadn't yet planned her next steps. Choosing the path of independent creation was, to some extent, a matter of going with the flow.

"Decisions come only after opportunities arrive," Xin Som says.

The origin of it all traces back to the "Small Universe Project" (now upgraded to the Light-Seeking Small Universe Award), an original animation competition and incubation platform launched by Bilibili in 2019, targeting college animation students, independent animators, and startup animation studios. Since its inception, the project has unearthed a series of outstanding works and creators, including influential pieces like Dragon Heart Maiden, Memory Management Bureau, and Fallen Dust in the animation industry.

To this day, the project has become a crucial channel for talent discovery and IP incubation within the domestic animation ecosystem, enabling animation graduates, independent animators, and emerging studios to be seen, while animation companies and investors can find the talent and teams that meet their needs.

Through participation in the Small Universe Project, Xin Som had the opportunity to get to know several industry veterans and, by chance, came across the chance to create a short for Bilibili's Spring Festival Gala.

"I was just a freshly graduated director who had only made one graduation project, and now I had to produce a film in three months." Such stringent demands made Xin Som apprehensive—after all, her graduation work took eight months from start to finish.

"When opportunity knocks, you can't miss it. You have to grit your teeth and take it." With that resolve, after four months of round-the-clock work, the short was finally completed and aired on the Spring Festival Gala.

That year's Spring Festival Gala theme was "Remembering the Qian Sui Era," focusing on retro and nostalgia. Xin Som's piece, "Merry-Go-Rom!!!" , can be seen as an extension of her graduation work, still featuring original characters as protagonists, retro art styles paired with vaporwave music.

The short's theme matched the year's gala quite well, and its audiovisual presentation stood out. The short brought Xin Som many new followers, and many viewers recognized her as the young creator who had emerged the previous summer through her distinct art style, further solidifying Xin Som's aesthetic label.

The short was a huge success, and Xin Som's fame rose with the Spring Festival Gala's buzz. This success solidified her resolve to become an independent director.

The project also brought Xin Som valuable experience and connections, and the new creative model gave her a completely different feeling from her school days.

"During the project, everyone communicated online, which felt quite different from working on my graduation piece. I felt like I was among a bunch of seniors, but as a newcomer I had to direct them, which made me a bit nervous. But overall, I really enjoyed the process—getting to know so many talented people, and most importantly, the final result turned out fantastic!"

Xin Som also joked that during that Spring Festival, she was "at her most glorious." That night, she directly announced to her family: "No one is allowed to watch the Spring Festival Gala tonight—everyone has to watch the Bilibili Gala!"

Unlike the non-stop project cycle of animation studios, freelancing offers considerable flexibility in working hours. After the successful completion of the Bilibili Gala project, Xin Som gave herself a three-month "mini-break," then jumped into new work, followed by another three-month break.

Whenever the sense of creative achievement and the exhaustion of high-intensity work filled her life, she would pause and clear the external pressure through rest and adjustment. "A project is really exhausting, so I take time to rest properly when I should. I do whatever I want."

02​

After the Hype Dies Down​

In 2025, Bilibili launched a new original animation support program: "1-Minute Animation Theater." The project seeks and selects animation creators through open calls and screenings, commissioning them to create one-minute animations based on given themes, providing funding, traffic, and promotional support. Its goal is to foster new animators with lower barriers and explore the potential of animation to evoke emotional resonance and attract traffic under extremely compressed runtimes. This is Bilibili's continued effort, following the Light-Seeking Small Universe Award, to build a stage for young animation creators to create and express, while converting these ideas into sustainable business operations.

In the initial phase of creation, the extreme compression of content into one minute became a major challenge for Xin Som. "At first I was thrilled when Bilibili's project reached out to me, and even more so when they said it was a one-minute animation—I thought it wouldn't take too long. But when I actually started working, I realized: how do you tell a story in one minute?"

To tackle this, Xin Som prepared two plans: Plan A focused on narrative, telling the story of several female college students working together to combat malicious rumor-mongering about women on campus; Plan B was a one-minute animated MV, paying tribute to classic film genres through four original female group OCs.

During the creative process, Xin Som found that Plan A was difficult to fully express within the one-minute limit, and narrative wasn't her strong suit, so she ultimately chose Plan B for further development. The final piece helped Xin Som gain even more exposure, achieving her highest view count and follower growth since becoming a creator.

"This project confirmed that the animation I create truly has an audience and commercial value, which makes me more willing to continue in this direction. Also, Bilibili's traffic support was very tangible—if I had released the piece alone, it probably wouldn't have gotten this many views."

Riding the momentum of the 1-minute animation theater, Xin Som produced derivative merchandise for the short, which proved very popular among her fanbase. At the same time, more brands reached out to her with offers. But just as her commercial commissions reached their peak since starting independent creation, Xin Som chose to hit the pause button.

Two consecutive years of commercial creation, while providing sustained financial support and creative motivation, also somewhat solidified her creative patterns. As a still-young creator, Xin Som's intense passion for creation drives her to step out of her comfort zone, seek transformation, and pursue higher creative goals.

"All the PV-style animations I've been doing are what the market demands; clients ask for customization, so I'm forced into that style. But I really want to tell stories and depict characters. Unfortunately, the market hasn't yet seen those abilities of mine.

So next, I plan to first try making short animations with plots and dialogue, lasting 30 seconds to a minute, completely self-initiated without commercial commissions. Ultimately, I want to create a full short film, maybe 6 or 10 minutes, with a complete story, characters, a world, and my own aesthetic style."

Xin Som envisions two directions for future creation:

The OCs that have been used from her graduation work to the 1-minute animation theater carry the most creative passion for Xin Som, and she will continue to use these characters for visual animations;

The other path is to produce short-form animated videos with a narrative bent. Xin Som believes that short-form video is easier to get started with, and as a medium, it can receive feedback more quickly than other video forms, allowing her to gauge audience preferences and adjust her content accordingly.

Whether it's school projects, graduation works, or the commercial projects she's taken on after graduation, "retro" has always been the most prominent label in Xin Som's works. Regarding this stylistic choice, Xin Som admits that on one hand, she personally loves the retro aesthetic and was quite obsessed with vaporwave aesthetics during college. More importantly, retro visuals can be achieved at a relatively low cost, serving as a shortcut for her creative process.

But she also doesn't want to limit her style to retro aesthetics alone. "I'd like to try anything that can make people feel beauty. If I only restrict myself to one style or type, it feels pretty boring."

Additionally, Xin Som has reflected on the shortcomings in her works' narratives. "I actually really want to make something about my own story, but I've lacked the experience and accumulation to do so—I simply can't produce it yet. So now I'm considering learning how to write a complete story that satisfies me."

03​

Looking Back and Looking Forward​

"I feel I still can't surpass the state I was in when making my graduation project. Sometimes I rewatch that film and find it unbelievable that I actually drew that!"

Xin Som feels that her graduation work wasn't really made in one year—it was made over more than twenty years. The film is only three minutes long, but it condenses all the movies she's watched, the people she's met, and the intense emotions she's experienced over those twenty-plus years.

For a long time after finishing her graduation project, Xin Som struggled to produce much. Even now, she hasn't fully regained that same abundant and intense desire to express, but she continues to accumulate and refine, hoping to return to that state.

Regarding her identity as an independent animation director, Xin Som appears especially excited and fulfilled. She believes this is a great time for animators, especially independent ones. The abundance of online tutorials for animation production and the many communities for exchanging ideas about animation have almost completely demystified the production process. Almost anyone can learn animation at a relatively low cost and thus have the ability to create their own work. Even a personal piece that's only tens of seconds long has the chance to shine on the internet and be recognized by audiences.

As for the emergence of AIGC, on one hand, it has impacted the traditional animation industry, but on the other hand, it has given many aspiring creators or those with limited resources a quicker tool for self-expression.

AI tools themselves are also evolving rapidly. Take Xin Som's specialty, retro style—current AI tools can generate images and video in that style with ease, meaning even someone with no animation skills can produce a fairly refined retro-style animation using AI tools.

But AI is still far from mature, even for independent creators like Xin Som. In fact, the current immaturity of AI and its sometimes excessive misuse have caused trouble for Xin Som.

"There's one really funny thing: during a previous project, I hired an outsourcing company to draw backgrounds, but they sent back a bunch of AI-generated images. I paid them for manual work, and they returned AI images—how dare you!"

The worst problem isn't actually using AI; it's that the generated images were so poor that "anyone could tell it was AI."

Xin Som feels that if AI-generated content is perfectly usable, she wouldn't mind, but the team she collaborated with, despite the immaturity of their AI techniques, didn't even have manual backup, leaving her to edit the substandard parts herself—adding unnecessary work. This awkward and absurd situation seems to reflect a microcosm of some animation production teams. After this incident, Xin Som has tended to seek collaborations with individual creators for the mid-stage work of her projects.

When asked about her future creative goals, Xin Som wants to try creating works that feel heartwarming like Hayao Miyazaki's, yet have a whimsical, romantic absurdity akin to "Amélie" . As an optimist, Xin Som's most powerful feeling in life is happiness.

"In college, my happiest moment every day was hanging out with my roommates, so when I started working on my graduation project, I wanted to make something about youth, expressing the philosophy of carpe diem."

Xin Som thinks it might be the happiness she felt from Miyazaki's animations that gave her the energy to create, and in her own work, she wants to pass that energy on to others. And in fact, she has achieved this goal.

"After watching my works, some people send me private messages saying they feel the beauty of the millennium, that the friendship between girls is wonderful, or that watching my animation restored their hope in life. Those words are the greatest encouragement for my creation—they're the responses I most want to see."

04​

Conclusion​

In the interview with Xin Som, the most immediate impression was her brimming, almost overflowing enthusiasm and optimism. Perhaps this trait is the core reason she has persisted in independent creation and found great popularity online.

Xin Som's creative motivation also carries a strong social networking attribute. Her creation itself is a process of finding like-minded people and expressing herself through platforms. This is not just a creative approach but a lifestyle. She uses her works as a social statement, showing the world what she likes to watch, what she likes to listen to, seeking resonance on an aesthetic level and discovering kindred spirits.

In online communities, independent animation creators no longer have to be solitary craftsmen working behind closed doors. Instead, they can actively choose to become a composite identity of content creator, aesthetic KOL, and community socializer. We look forward to more animation creators in the future using platforms and their works to bravely and confidently present themselves, and truly be seen.