Tebbi Mokopane, interview subject and co-creator. Shown at the 2023 Glasgow School of Art Degree Show and selected for the GSA Showcase and POST exhibition.
Final Film
The project started with a question about the post-COVID moment: why are young men retreating into online communities built around grievance, dominance, and hyper-masculine identity? Research drew on journalism, academic writing, and firsthand accounts around incel culture, the manosphere, and the documented rise in male loneliness following pandemic-era social isolation. The interview with Tebbi, honest, unscripted, and quietly searching, became the emotional anchor. A young man's real account of what disconnection actually feels like, beneath the noise of the spaces that claim to answer it.
Visual research centred on psychedelic and outsider art: the kaleidoscopic intensity of 1960s psychedelia, the crude urgency of underground zine illustration, and the warped figuration of artists who treat the body as an expression of mental state rather than physical fact. The rough line, the unstable form, the colour that does not quite sit still. These became the visual metaphor for a mindset in flux, reaching for certainty and finding none. The illustrations needed to feel like they were still becoming.
All illustration was developed in Clip Studio Paint, chosen for its expressive brush feel and native support for frame-by-frame animation with onion skin layers. Character design kept proportions loose and slightly distorted, not cute, not monstrous, but somewhere between the two, to reflect the liminal psychological space the film inhabits. Backgrounds were built as mood environments: saturated, shifting, and occasionally overwhelming, inspired by psychedelic poster art and the visual intensity of an overloaded inner world.
The roughness of the mark-making was intentional and preserved throughout. Where another project might smooth to a clean final line, this film kept the sketch energy in every finished frame, a visual acknowledgment that the mindset being explored is itself unresolved, still forming. Storyboards were mapped panel by panel against the interview audio, with transitions designed to disorient gently rather than resolve, mirroring the way the manosphere keeps its members perpetually seeking.
Animation was produced entirely in Clip Studio Paint using its frame-by-frame timeline and onion skin functionality, which displays the previous and next frames as ghost layers to guide consistent motion. Movement was deliberately imprecise. Characters shift and morph slightly between holds, figures breathing in a way that feels alive but unstable. No cleanup pass, no smoothing. The roughness was protected from first sketch to final export: the animation looks like something in the process of becoming, which is the point.
Audio was edited in Premiere Pro and Audition. Tebbi's interview was cleaned and balanced, then set against ambient sound and a minimal soundtrack. The film was shown at the 2023 Glasgow School of Art Degree Show, selected for the GSA Showcase, and exhibited at the POST exhibition by GSA Exhibitions Department. Co-created with Tebbi Mokopane.
Stills
Reflection
This project taught me how to let subject matter drive form. The rough, psychedelic illustration style was not a separate aesthetic choice. It came directly from trying to visualise what it feels like to be a young man in the post-COVID world: overloaded, searching, surrounded by noise that offers certainty but delivers none. Working frame by frame in Clip Studio Paint, and protecting the roughness rather than cleaning it up, was itself an act of trust in the material. The manosphere is a subject people are quick to judge. Making this film required empathy without endorsement, understanding why young men find those spaces without pretending those spaces are good for them. Shown at the 2023 GSA Degree Show and the POST exhibition. BA Communication Design, Glasgow School of Art, 2023. Co-created with Tebbi Mokopane.