In 2020, the Sunhak Peace Prize launched an animation contest centered around seven themes of peace. A friend and I decided to join it as a team. Religious Harmony was our theme of choice, our goal was to illustrate the interconnectedness of the world's major religions through shared symbols, overlapping imagery, and text in multiple languages. Our 42-second animation was awarded an Honorable Mention.

The main challenge was finding a cohesive way to represent multiple religions visually while emphasizing what connects them rather than what separates them. We wanted to include key symbols from the world's major faiths without the piece feeling cluttered or overwhelming, and we were genuinely careful about being as inclusive as possible. Missing a religion felt like a real risk, so symbols and sentences in multiple languages appear throughout the video as a way to cast a wider net.

Balancing clarity, inclusivity, and emotional resonance in under a minute was the creative problem at the center of everything.

I led the concept, visual design, and full animation of the piece. But this project genuinely wouldn't have happened without my friend Beatriz Lima, who brought the contest to my attention in the first place and then kept everything running from there. She managed deadlines, coordinated the submission, handled all communications with the contest team, and provided creative feedback throughout the process. Doing all of that on top of the creative work would have been overwhelming. She made it possible.

We explored religious iconography, symbolic overlaps, and interfaith motifs, looking for ways to make those connections feel visually intuitive rather than just informative. The approach that felt most natural was letting the symbols flow into each other, merging and transitioning through zooms so one religion's imagery could seamlessly become another's.

For the mood, I chose a track by Caru, a Brazilian artist I was working with around the same time on an animated music video. Her song "Nina" had exactly the warmth and softness the piece needed, and having free access to her music made it an easy and meaningful choice.

All visual elements were designed in Illustrator, keeping a flat, organic vector style that felt warm and illustrative rather than corporate or clinical. After Effects handled the animation, with subtle motion applied to shapes, symbols, and textures to give the composition depth and life.

The transitions were the most important technical decision: zoom ins and zoom outs that let one symbol dissolve into the next, creating a visual flow that carried the story of connection forward without hard cuts breaking the mood.

Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects

The early sketches explored many ways to link the symbols together before the zoom transition approach became the clear direction. From there the iterations were mostly about refining timing, composition, and the balance of symbols to make sure no single religion felt more prominent than another.

Feedback from Beatriz and peer reviews helped sharpen those decisions, keeping the piece clear and inclusive without overcomplicating the visual flow.

The final animation combined textured, illustrative vectors with organic motion to communicate interconnectedness. Religious symbols from multiple faiths merge into each other through seamless zoom transitions, with sentences in multiple languages woven throughout to make the piece feel as inclusive as possible.

The result is 42 seconds that feel calm, warm, and quietly hopeful, which was exactly the tone Religious Harmony called for.