X-Story: One Year Later

Vitaly Shushko’s visually stunning X-STORY has been out on the internet for just over a year now and it’s an impressive and ambitious piece of indie animation well worth your time.

Shusko, who lives in St. Petersburg Russia, animated and directed with a small team of two other animators and three compositors, yet the film has the pacing and production values of a professional film. On his blog Shusko says he worked for two years on the twelve-minute piece and frankly given the quality of the production and the size of his team, it’s pretty amazing he was able to complete it that quickly. Two years goes by fast in the life of an indie animator and the results are frequently not as polished or promising as they are here.

The plot is simple: our hero – equipped with a prosthetic Power Arm gets his hands on a treasure map and goes on a quest to find whatever lies under the proverbial X. By the time it’s over, the story has subverted our expectations and pays off with an ironic ending that puts into question both our protagonist’s ambition and the value of trading off part of his humanity to achieve it.

Wordless and scored with a propulsive synthwave soundtrack our (mostly) unstoppable floppy-haired hero’s quest plays out against lushly designed backgrounds that draw from everything from Akira (of course) to Heavy Metal magazine. There’s a platformer video game vibe to the linear nature of the quest that actually made me wish I was playing this adventure rather than watching. I mean who wouldn’t want to use that Power Arm?

Per his blog, Shushko says he animated in TVpaint, Photoshop, and AfterEffects. He’d been posting production updates throughout the development process of X-Story but his last blog post was the short itself back in November of 2016. His youtube channel has also not been updated since so hopefully he’s hard at work on his next creation. He remains active on Instagram but after seeing this piece I almost want to begin a “Where’s Vitaliy?” campaign. Whatever he’s up to now, we can only hope it’s as ambitious as X-Story and that someone is paying him handsomely for his talent and services.