I created the special effects and animations for the feature film L’étourdit, directed by Paris Lavidis, a brilliant Ph.D. student supervised by philosopher Slavoj Žižek. The film is based on a seminal text by Jacques Lacan, an incredible French psychoanalyst who offered one of the most influential interpretations of Freud’s work through the lens of language and mathematics. The film transforms the theoretical text into a narrative centered on a one-night stand between a man and a woman and its aftermath. According to Lacan, the structures of language make us sexual beings. This means that, for humans, sexuality is displaced in specific ways, which Lacan maps out through the mathematical discipline of topology. My role was to visualize these structures as they manifest in the couple’s encounters.

Using Blender and After Effects, I moved beyond purely aesthetic design and engaged in a rigorous yet creative process. Following Lavidis’s lead, I used accurate mathematical formulas to model and animate the torus, Möbius strip, and cross-cap, which Lacan used to map the topology of the subject. I managed the entire pipeline, animating the intricate transitions between these objects to depict the shifts in the relationship, did the final rendering and prepared the preliminary compositing and handoff to color grading and final composition.