Behind the Scenes

The school locations were treated as emotional spaces as much as physical ones. Hallways, office interiors, and classroom-adjacent areas helped frame Shayla within a world of rules, expectations, and social pressure. 

Those spaces were also made possible through relationships with Seattle Public Schools, the M5 Building, and the YMCA. Each location brought a different texture to the production. The school settings gave the film its everyday realism, the M5 Building offered practical production flexibility, and the YMCA helped support the community-centered spirit behind the project. 

The art direction by Burtukaan Taaddasaa Adaree and Tiffany Tse helped shape those spaces into Shayla’s world. Their work supported the grounded realism of the school environment while leaving room for the heightened visual language that emerges as Shayla’s inner life begins to surface. 

Tiffany and Burtukaan also helped define Shayla’s home environment, giving it warmth, personality, and a sense of family history. In contrast to the public spaces where Shayla is judged or challenged, the home setting gives the film a more intimate emotional center. The details of that space help suggest who Shayla is when she is away from the pressure of school, and they support the relationship between Shayla and Papa as a source of grounding, memory, and identity.

Behind the camera, the challenge was to keep the production language simple and direct. The images needed to support the performances first, while still allowing the fantasy elements to feel connected to character, place, and emotion.

The visual effects reveal Shayla’s inner life: the pressure she carries, the mystery around her, and the power she has not yet fully understood. 

The effects were designed as emotional cues rather than spectacle. Water, light, and vision imagery give the audience a way to feel Shayla’s internal conflict before she is able to fully name it. 

The look-development process focused on finding a visual language that could feel heightened without pulling the audience out of Shayla’s story. Early tests explored how water, glow, reflection, and distortion could suggest emotion, power, and transformation. RealFlow and X-Particles were used to develop fluid and particle-based elements, while Cinema 4D and Arnold Render helped shape the look, lighting, and rendered texture of those effects. 

The final VFX work brought together compositing, color, motion design, and practical production elements. Tools such as DaVinci Resolve and Fusion helped integrate those elements into the finished film, but the guiding principle remained simple: every effect needed to serve performance, character, and story. Because the film is intimate, the extraordinary needed to feel as if it was rising naturally out of Shayla’s experience.

Because the film is intimate, the effects had to stay connected to performance. The goal was to make the extraordinary feel like it was rising naturally out of Shayla’s experience.

Each scene was built around Shayla’s emotional state. The goal was to let the tension, silence, and fantasy elements unfold with intention.

Post-production brought together editing, sound design, music, color, and visual effects to establish the final tone of the film. The edit shaped the rhythm of Shayla’s journey, but the emotional atmosphere depended just as much on the sound and music.

 Sean Dwyer, through Hazy Bay, shaped the film’s sound design and final mix, giving Shayla its sense of space, tension, and mystery. The sound work supports the contrast between the grounded school environment and the more heightened moments connected to Shayla’s inner experience.

 Sean’s score also helped guide the film’s emotional movement, giving shape to moments of vulnerability, pressure, and recognition. Eugene Yaw Amponsah’s traditional African drumming added another layer of texture and cultural resonance, helping the music connect to the film’s larger sense of identity and inner power.

 Together, the sound design, mix, score, and musical performances helped make the extraordinary elements feel connected to Shayla’s emotional reality rather than separate from it.

Each screening and recognition has created another opportunity to talk about the story, the performances, and the creative choices behind the film.

The journey has also helped the film find a broader community of programmers, filmmakers, and audiences who connect with intimate genre storytelling and character-driven fantasy.