Cheryl Cruz’s Short Film, Morpho, Places Third in UIL Traditional Animation DV 2

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Cheryl Cruz, 11, receives her award for her film “Morpho” at the Paramount Theater.

Houston Fuller, Reporter

The UIL Film Festival state finals took place on Mar. 1st. Junior Cheryl Cruz won third place in DV 2 Traditional Animation for her short film, “Morpho.”

“I was originally inspired by an old writing prompt I saw a while back about a butterfly-moth friendship and I was just thinking about it one day and I had the idea,” Cruz said.

“Morpho” tells the story of Twitch and Scout, two garden caterpillars who set off as new friends looking forward to becoming butterflies together. Cruz said that her dad helped inspire the story.

“My dad showed me a picture of a bunch of caterpillars he found in his garden which turned out to be moth caterpillars, and that’s when the inspiration really hit me, and I changed up the story to what it is now,” Cruz said.

Traditional animation is a form of animation in which each frame is hand drawn by hand. This technique was the dominant form of animation until computer animation was invented.

The Paramount Theater, a live theatre venue and movie theatre has been a host to a wide variety of acts ranging from musicals, movies, and the UIL Film Festival. First place went to The Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders and second to Los Fresnos High School.

Original music from Cassidy Pena, and voices from Brady Allen as Twitch are a few of the friends Cruz had help with the film. Her movie can be found below: