In ‘Our Final Frontier’, the director/animator seamlessly blends animation and live-action to ground the message that we're on-track for a dark future before gender parity.

The director uses retrofuturism and surrealism to hand design a world that feels heightened without feeling false. By blending true-to-life elements with a futuristic twist – like a subway in an underwater tunnel – the world immediately grounds itself in our own. Textural flaws and imperfect camera movement also worked to similar effect.

The character design was informed by this process too. Live-action plates of an actor were shot green-screen. They were then fed into an AI algorithm and, through a process called style transfer, seamlessly blended into the animation.

Through this technique, the director finely expresses the film’s melding of the human and technological, using the verisimilitude of the hero woman’s movement to ground the world into a recognisable - yet dire - future.