Reality in Transition: the trailer for the 2026 edition of When East Meets West.

When East Meets West is one of the leading international film co-production forums and markets, held every year in Trieste.

For the 2026 edition it entrusted me with the trailer, to be built from the poster illustrated by Toni Demuro.

The concept at the heart of the edition was “Reality in Transition” — a theme about the deep transformation of the language of cinema, where digital tools and artificial intelligence are redefining how we imagine and build stories. In the illustration, this shift becomes an image rich in atmosphere: a dark forest, with the white body of the protagonist standing out among the trunks.

The challenge was to start from that image and imagine what happens beyond its edges, turning a single illustration into an animated sequence without altering its style or identity .

I traced the elements of the illustration in Illustrator , mostly the trees, and rebuilt them on separate layers so the forest could come to life. In After Effects I built the scene with 3D cameras for a light parallax and a simple rig for the character's walk.

I wanted the forest to feel alive and the rhythm to resemble a slow breath — made of silences, pauses and small movements. The figure reveals itself little by little and walks without hurry, while the elements come in one after another, by subtraction rather than accumulation.

I took care of concept, direction and animation, choosing the right timing for every gesture: pauses long enough to let the image breathe, a steady walk, a parallax that guides the eye without taking over the scene.

Completing the sequence is the soundtrack by Alan Malusà: it tiptoes in and carries the images along in a continuous flow, where everything keeps evolving without ever really stopping.