Shimmer (also known as Fulgores) is an indie short that packs a big emotional punch.
An exploration of parent and child relationships, it tells the story of a shipwrecked family whose father’s efforts to secure their rescue borders on the obsessive—to the detriment of his bond with his children.
Created in collaboration with students at Unreal Academic Partner school Escena in Mexico City, the film reached one of the most prestigious stages in Mexico, winning Best Animated Short Film at the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures’ Ariel Awards.
Shimmer was originally going to be produced using a traditional animation renderer. But a desire to explore crucial elements like lighting early led the team to switch to a pipeline based on Unreal Engine.
The decision to move to Unreal Engine mid-production could have been risky. Instead, it became pivotal.
“I don’t think we would have finished the short on time and on budget if it hadn’t been for UE5,” says Andrés Palma, Writer, Director, and Producer on Shimmer.
They ended up using UE for everything from assembly and lighting to VFX and rendering. The results are a powerful example of how Unreal Engine enables educational teams to achieve professional-level results—and why animation schools are moving to real-time pipelines.
An exploration of parent and child relationships, it tells the story of a shipwrecked family whose father’s efforts to secure their rescue borders on the obsessive—to the detriment of his bond with his children.
Created in collaboration with students at Unreal Academic Partner school Escena in Mexico City, the film reached one of the most prestigious stages in Mexico, winning Best Animated Short Film at the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures’ Ariel Awards.
Shimmer was originally going to be produced using a traditional animation renderer. But a desire to explore crucial elements like lighting early led the team to switch to a pipeline based on Unreal Engine.
The decision to move to Unreal Engine mid-production could have been risky. Instead, it became pivotal.
“I don’t think we would have finished the short on time and on budget if it hadn’t been for UE5,” says Andrés Palma, Writer, Director, and Producer on Shimmer.
They ended up using UE for everything from assembly and lighting to VFX and rendering. The results are a powerful example of how Unreal Engine enables educational teams to achieve professional-level results—and why animation schools are moving to real-time pipelines.
A personal story
As the Director of Project-Based Learning at the Escena School of Animation and Creative Arts, Palma led the team that created Shimmer, collaborating with Santiago Maza Stern and a number of students at the Escena Animation Studio—a skills incubator run by the school.
The story behind Shimmer was a deeply personal one for Palma, delving into his own fears and apprehensions around the idea of fatherhood.
“It’s about a man far too obsessed with his work to be a good dad, and a daughter too proud to admit she’s out of her depth when it comes to striking out on her own,” he explains. “It’s about two characters with too much hubris and too little grace for one another, entrenched in a struggle that will tear them apart.”
Images courtesy of Escena, Escuela de Animación
The idea had its genesis in the breakup of a 10-year relationship.
“She wanted children, I didn’t, and that’s not the kind of thing where a compromise can be achieved,” says Palma.
He turned to literature during this turbulent time, chancing upon a short story by George Saunders called Sticks that focuses on an emotionally neglectful father who repents too late in life to be forgiven by his children.
“I started to kick around the idea of writing a script that revolved around the father I feared becoming if forced into the role,” says Palma. “Ricardo was not written as an evil man—just a selfish one who puts his work before his children until it’s too late to get them back.”
“She wanted children, I didn’t, and that’s not the kind of thing where a compromise can be achieved,” says Palma.
He turned to literature during this turbulent time, chancing upon a short story by George Saunders called Sticks that focuses on an emotionally neglectful father who repents too late in life to be forgiven by his children.
“I started to kick around the idea of writing a script that revolved around the father I feared becoming if forced into the role,” says Palma. “Ricardo was not written as an evil man—just a selfish one who puts his work before his children until it’s too late to get them back.”
Images courtesy of Escena, Escuela de Animación
Palma wanted to present a father character who could easily be read as a villain in the first half of the story without completely removing his humanity.
“A lot of my reasons for doing the film swirled around coming to terms with my personal choices around fatherhood, and being able to give myself some measure of forgiveness for those choices,” he explains.
As the title suggests, light is one of the central themes in Shimmer—and this central narrative device directly influenced the team’s choice of Unreal Engine to create the film.
“A lot of my reasons for doing the film swirled around coming to terms with my personal choices around fatherhood, and being able to give myself some measure of forgiveness for those choices,” he explains.
As the title suggests, light is one of the central themes in Shimmer—and this central narrative device directly influenced the team’s choice of Unreal Engine to create the film.
Images courtesy of Escena, Escuela de Animación
Lighting the way with Unreal Engine
From the father’s lighthouse obsession and Lucia’s rescue flares to the strange glowing creatures that illuminate the sky, lighting is instrumental to the storytelling in Shimmer.
“Light plays a crucial role in the film,” says Palma. “You could say that for almost any film, but in Shimmer, it’s practically a character of its own. The different sources of light, like the flashlight, the rescue flares, or the lighthouse all represent the hopes and dreams of one of the three main characters—and a lot of the story is driven by them turning each other’s lights on and off.”
The film’s climax sees the appearance of hundreds of bioluminescent creatures, pushing the theme even further.
The team originally set out to render the short film in Arnold, “partly because it was the software we had experience with, and partly because I was wary that real-time rendering would imply a hit in quality,” says Palma.
Those fears were proven unfounded when the team brought a new team member on board.
“We hired an amazing lighting sup, Pablo Cárdenas, who knew his way around Arnold but was also a UE5 evangelist, and he turned us all into converts,” says Palma.
Images courtesy of Escena, Escuela de Animación
Unlike a traditional renderer, which might have taken hours to produce renders after every tweak was made, Unreal Engine enabled the team to adjust lights on the fly and see the results instantly.
“Having software that could allow us to preview early on how these lights were interacting—not only with very dense geometry but also with the story itself—without sacrificing final render quality was crucial to us,” says Palma. “We’re a small independent studio without a render farm readily available, and being able to work our lighting in UE5 was undoubtedly a game changer for us.”
Real-time feedback unlocked creative iteration and removed traditional bottlenecks—but it also came with a more human benefit.
“What I didn’t expect was how much fun I would personally have lighting some sequences of the short,” says Palma.
The team leader had originally planned to light a dozen shots or so from his favorite sequence in the film.
“I ended up lighting about 50 or so, which would have been unthinkable before, and I had a blast doing so,” he says.
“Having software that could allow us to preview early on how these lights were interacting—not only with very dense geometry but also with the story itself—without sacrificing final render quality was crucial to us,” says Palma. “We’re a small independent studio without a render farm readily available, and being able to work our lighting in UE5 was undoubtedly a game changer for us.”
Real-time feedback unlocked creative iteration and removed traditional bottlenecks—but it also came with a more human benefit.
“What I didn’t expect was how much fun I would personally have lighting some sequences of the short,” says Palma.
The team leader had originally planned to light a dozen shots or so from his favorite sequence in the film.
“I ended up lighting about 50 or so, which would have been unthinkable before, and I had a blast doing so,” he says.
Images courtesy of Escena, Escuela de Animación
Bringing the bioluminescent schools to life
The team used UE5 extensively beyond lighting, from assembly to simulations for hair, fur, and crowds.
Palma calls out Nanite and Niagara as standout features—particularly when it came to creating the glowing schools of flying fish.
“Niagara allowed us to bring in hundreds of glowing fish creatures with different geometries and introduce variations in their texture-driven animation cycles, look development, and light emission, then choreograph the entire schools of fish as they interacted with our keyframed hero assets,” he says. “We were beyond thrilled with the possibilities!”
It wasn’t all smooth sailing however—the team faced technical challenges around optimizing the rotation of the fishes’ different animations and improving their glow.
“Learning how to use Blueprints helped a lot,” recalls Palma, referring to Unreal Engine’s intuitive visual scripting system. “We could make a single Blueprint with multiple animations, a light component, and control over material shaders, and we had it all in a single bundle alongside Niagara.
That Blueprint gave the team centralized control over each fish instance. For a small team, the ability to manage this complexity without massive overhead was transformative.
“It worked wonders,” says Palma.
Images courtesy of Escena, Escuela de Animación
From the classroom to the red carpet
With Shimmer now completed and in contention for a host of awards—including an Oscar qualification—Palma has some words of wisdom for animation schools still relying on traditional offline pipelines that are considering a switch to Unreal Engine.
“It makes so much sense to do so,” he says. “Most of these schools don’t have render farms readily available, and the ability to see results in real time as opposed to waiting half an hour for a preview is a godsend.”
Shimmer’s accolades are a signal of what’s possible when education embraces real-time technology.
With Unreal Engine 5, Escena’s team assembled, simulated, lit, and rendered a visually ambitious animated short—one that stands confidently alongside industry productions.
For animation schools weighing the move to real time, Shimmer offers a clear message: the future of animation is faster, more creative, more accessible—and already happening in the classroom.