whimsy > prompts
- Elise Jolie
- May 27
- 2 min read
bringing back nostalgia for joy has felt important to me lately. maybe because everything online feels so optimized now. so fast. so polished. so generated. i think i just wanted to make something that felt like being a kid sitting cross legged on the floor opening a pink nintendo ds for the first time again.
this started as a really simple idea — putting moose inside a nintendogs world — and somehow turned into hours of building floating dream environments, layering petals and bubbles in after effects, making fake ds interfaces, compositing green screen footage, and trying to teach myself how to make everything feel dimensional without losing that soft flat charm the original game had.
honestly the compositing fought me the entire way through this project. moose’s fur was almost the exact same tone as parts of the green screen so keying him out became this constant balance between losing his curls or leaving weird artifacts around him. then i ran into color space issues that either made everything look super muted or completely blown out and crunchy. there were definitely moments where i stared at the timeline thinking maybe this entire thing just looked fake and weird.
but i think somewhere in the process i stopped trying to make it look perfect and started trying to make it feel something instead.
most of the animation was built through layered parallax scenes in after effects — separating backgrounds into different depths, adding floating petals drifting at different speeds, subtle camera movement, dreamy haze, soft glows, and eventually placing the entire ds into its own floating world. i wanted it to feel less like a polished 3d render and more like a memory of a game i loved too much as a kid.
i still have a really long way to go technically, but i’m really proud of this one because i kept pushing through every part that frustrated me instead of abandoning it halfway through. i think that matters.
also maybe this project was my reminder that i still care more about whimsy over prompts. i like spending hours moving petals around frame by frame. i like the imperfections. i like when you can feel the person (or dog) behind something.
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