UCLA ENTERTAINMENT STUDIO
Project by: Neha Oswal | Aishwarya Rajasekar | Akshada Muley
Instructors: Natasha Sandmeir and Nathan Su
FOREVER offers a counter-narrative to the anthropocentric lens through which we typically understand the city. It proposes that urban environments are not solely shaped by human life, but are shared with a range of non-human entities, each with their own tendencies, behaviors, and forms of presence. Beyond natural ecologies, however, we also coexist with synthetic planetary organisms most notably, the vast and persistent world of plastic.
This film treats that condition as an opportunity to reframe our relationship with plastic: not simply as one defined by guilt, blame, or disposability, but as one that demands empathy, responsibility, and a more conscious form of cohabitation. In doing so, it seeks to make plastic visible again transforming a material dulled by banality into something emotionally and spatially present within the city. No longer passive, plastic appears here as an active collective: gathering, moving, and asserting itself against the urban environments that produced and abandoned it.
The project is structured around an overarching meta-narrative embedded within the fabric of the city. It addresses the affluenza of contemporary urban life through an anthropomorphic lens, granting agency to plastic waste as a way of confronting the consequences of human excess. In this speculative world, plastic begins to migrate through the city, displaying strange and unsettling behaviors as it attempts to break free from the systems that contain it. The narrative unfolds across three interrelated scales - the supermarket, the street, and the city. Though familiar, these spaces are rendered uncanny through the agency of the material itself. As the story progresses, the viewer is drawn into a world where plastic is no longer inert, but animate; no longer invisible, but affective. By attributing intention and movement to an inanimate body, the film reveals hidden urban realities and prompts a renewed reflection on the afterlife of our own creations.
FOREVER is ultimately a meditation on permanence, neglect, and coexistence. It asks what it means to live among materials that outlast us, evade disappearance, and begin to claim a life and a world of their own. The following video is a pre-visualization of the larger film: a journey in which plastic is no longer a byproduct, but a protagonist on a mission.
Freeway on the outskirts of the city | Scene by Akshada Muley
Scene By Akshada Muley & Aishwarya Rajasekar
Scene by Aishwarya Rajasekar
Elements,Texturing and Lighting - Akshada Muley, Animation - Aishwarya Rajasekar
Scene by Akshada Muley
Scene by Akshada Muley
Scene by Aishwarya Rajasekar
Scene by Aishwarya Rajasekar
Elements,Texturing and Lighting - Akshada Muley, Animation - Neha Oswal
Elements,Texturing and Lighting -Aishwarya Rajasekar, Animation - Neha Oswal
Scene by Akshada Muley
Scene by Akshada Muley
Scene by Akshada Muley
Elements,Texturing and Lighting - Akshada Muley, Animation - Neha Oswal
Elements,Texturing and Lighting - Akshada Muley, Animation - Neha Oswal,Akshada Muley
Plastic bag swooshing past - United in feat | Elements,Texturing and Lighting - Akshada Muley, Animation - Aishwarya Rajasekar
Story Board - Preliminary draft of movies in form of sketches
The affluenza world full of objects - indicating the exit of the plastic from the city | Scene by Akshada Muley
The very own plastic on a mission - Exit from the cities | Scene by Akshada Muley
