This Indie Animated Horror Short About Parenthood Is Incredible

Michael Berardini's Monitor, an indie horror short that opened this year's Annecy International Animation Film Festival, first caught our attention back in 2024, when we featured it on 80 Level as a WIP shot. Now the film is finally finished, and it was definitely worth the year and a half Berardini spent making it, and he also taught himself Blender along the way. The short's music was composed by Batu Sener, with sound design handled by Jérémy Ben Ammar.

At just two minutes long, Monitor manages to make you feel a lot. The camera work is fantastic, the animation is incredibly smooth, and the whole thing is executed beautifully. It's genuinely terrifying, too. For parents, the short might hit a little closer to home: Berardini is a father of two himself. Beneath the supernatural horror are some very real fears: worrying that something might happen to your child, feeling like you're not doing enough to protect them, and dealing with the guilt and reluctance that can come with parenthood.

Berardini is also clear about where he stands on AI in creative work: it had no part in the making of Monitor.

"At no point did I consider using gen AI to speed up my workflow. Because the end product is not the point. Art is about the process. I learned a lot. Time well spent."