3D Animated Short Film: The Colors of Evil (Ringling, 2012)

The Colors of Evil is a 2012 computer-animated short from Ringling College of Art and Design, written, directed, and animated by Alyse Miller and Phillip Simon. It landed in the sweet spot student films sometimes hit: festival recognition, a Vimeo Staff Pick, a SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival feature, and a wide online audience that discovered it through channels like TheCGBros. The premise is compact and memorable. A bullied student named Vivian tries to summon a demon for revenge. The ritual works—just not in the way a gothic revenge fantasy is supposed to work.

For viewers who collect 3D shorts, the film is worth knowing as craft and as comedy: polished student CG married to a color-and-character gag that still travels well years after its festival run.

Who made it, and where it came from

Miller and Simon developed The Colors of Evil as a thesis-level project inside Ringling’s computer animation program, a school long associated with industry-ready character work. Credits circulating with popular uploads also point to collaborators beyond the two directors, including music by Carlos Martin and sound design by Dione Tan—reminders that even a “student short” is a crew sport once picture, sound, and color land together.

Tool talk matters to animators studying the piece. Public descriptions of the pipeline commonly list Autodesk Maya for building and animating, Pixar RenderMan for lighting and rendering, Nuke for compositing, plus familiar finishing tools in the Adobe orbit and 3D painting utilities such as 3D-Coat. The point is not brand worship; it is that the short reads as a complete lighting-and-surface exercise, not a gray-shaded layout reel with a punchline taped on.

Festival and award notes attached to the project’s Behance presentation include Best Animated Short at the Palm Beach International Film Festival, a HollyShorts finalist nod, SIGGRAPH 2012 festival inclusion, Chicago International REEL Shorts, Supertoon, a National Board of Review student grant connection, and the Vimeo Staff Pick. Those markers explain why the film kept circulating in “must-watch short” roundups in 2012 and after.

Story without draining the joke dry

IMDb’s synopsis captures the setup cleanly: children pick on one another; Vivian has had enough of daily torment from schoolmate Nancy; she turns to a dark-arts summoning for a demon servant; the results refuse to stay on-script. Online writeups often emphasize the tonal flip—gothic intention colliding with something unexpectedly adorable—and that contrast is the film’s engine. Revenge fantasy packaging opens the door; character design and color punchline walk through it.

Because so much of the pleasure is timed reaction and visual reveal, a reviewer’s job is to point at structure rather than narrate every beat. Watch for how staging sells Vivian’s seriousness first, how the summoned presence misaligns with demonic expectation, and how Nancy’s bullying persona meets a problem she cannot solve with ordinary mean-girl tactics. The comedy lands harder if you let the short play cold.

At roughly four minutes in widely shared uploads, the runtime is snackable for classrooms and portfolio nights alike. That brevity is a feature: the film states a conflict, flips it, and exits before the gag thins.

Why the animation still feels watchable

Student CG from the early 2010s can date quickly—plastic skin, overbright rim lights, stiff cloth. The Colors of Evil holds up better than average because character silhouettes read clearly in stills and motion. Costuming and palette do story work: Vivian’s darker aesthetic sets a promise the plot then undercuts, while the summoned figure’s design leans into warmth and approachability that bullies (and audiences) are not primed to fear.

Performance animation matters as much as modeling. Eyelines, timing on reactions, and the physical comedy of mismatched power dynamics keep the short from becoming a single-joke poster. Lighting supports readability in interior and ritual moments without drowning faces in noise. Sound design and music—easy to underrate in viral silent-scroll culture—sell commitment to the spell and then the tonal crash when cuteness invades the frame.

For students, the takeaway is integrated storytelling. Software lists impress demo reels less than a short that knows what it is about. Miller and Simon’s piece is frequently cited in that teaching context: a clear protagonist want, an obstacle, a twist that grows from character design rather than a random cutaway.

Where it sat in 2012’s short-film web culture

The early 2010s were a boom for CG shorts traveling from school festivals to YouTube aggregators. Channels that curated animation gave films like this a second life beyond campus screenings. Tracking-Board–style “things we love” posts and CG showcase channels framed The Colors of Evil as an affection hit—cute without being empty, darkly packaged without being grim.

That distribution path matters historically. A Ringling thesis could suddenly share attention with studio teasers in the same feed. View counts on popular uploads climbed into the high hundreds of thousands on individual posts and far higher across mirrors, which is how a student comedy became reference material for “have you seen this?” conversations among animators.

Career folklore around successful student shorts often includes studio doors opening after festival heat. Treat individual employment stories cautiously unless confirmed by the artists; what is safer to say is that visibility at SIGGRAPH and major short festivals has long functioned as a professional signal in animation hiring.

How to watch it now

Search under the full title plus Miller and Simon or Ringling to avoid unrelated “colors of evil” results from other media. Prefer uploads that credit the filmmakers and music/sound contributors. Watch once without commentary overlays; the timing is the joke.

If you are studying the short, scrub for silhouette tests: pause on key poses and ask whether you could read who holds power before anyone speaks. Note color temperature shifts around the summoning and the aftermath. Compare the bully’s body language before and after the twist. Those notes teach more than copying a Maya shelf layout.

Pairing suggestions for a mini screening night could include other Ringling-era character comedies or SIGGRAPH festival selections from the same window—pieces that balance craft flex with a human beat. Keep the program short; The Colors of Evil works best when it is not buried under an hour of similar twists.

For a magazine that tracks illustration and animation finds, this short earns its URL: a polished 3D student comedy from 2012 that still explains, in a few minutes, how character design can detonate a revenge plot more elegantly than any exposition dump.