VEv
2015 · 3m · Norway
Directed by Erik Ferguson
Genres: animation, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
In a sterile, hyperrealistic laboratory, strange organ-like meat creatures are brought to life and die, the product of a VFX artist's 'mad scientist' experiment in animating the grotesque.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone's tired of CGI looking sterile and soulless—so Ferguson goes full grotesque, weaponizes photoreal rendering to make flesh-meat that shouldn't exist in a clinical void, and suddenly the "dead" medium is the most viscerally *alive* thing on screen. It's the kind of subversive move that makes you rethink what animation can provoke.
Ferguson positions VEv in the lineage of body horror cinema while treating CGI as a rigorous formal material rather than mere spectacle; the restraint of the laboratory setting and the precision of the rendering become a controlled argument about representation and materiality. It's a short that knows exactly what tradition it's interrogating.
The decision to render these organ-creatures with full photorealistic detail—every wet membrane, every pulsing asymmetry—inside an antiseptic white box transforms what could be cheap shock value into something genuinely unsettling; that tonal friction between clinical sterility and biological chaos is carried entirely by that single VFX choice.
Reviews
Heart-Pumping VFX Short Explores a Medical Experiment Gone Wrong
The grotesque and unsettling animated films and artwork of Erik Ferguson.