I’m kicking off a new Monday night spotlight series. Think of it as a weekly dive into animated (and occasionally not-animated) short films that punch way above their runtime. Little cinematic gems. World slices. Those “wait, why isn’t this a full movie yet?” moments we all love. I have a bunch of old ones I'll need to dig from my archives of liked videos.
And for the very first entry, I had to start with something that recently grabbed me instantly.
That something is The Lost Tower, a Blender short by concept artist Florent Lebrun.
A pilot, a plane, and an ocean full of ancient secrets
The premise is almost meditative, a lone pilot gliding above uncharted waters, searching for one of the fabled Lost Towers. No narration. No lore dump. Just atmosphere thick enough to bottle.
Lebrun’s painterly touch is everywhere: soft haze, massive structures half-buried in mist, and that beautiful tension between loneliness and discovery. It feels like a keyframe from a forgotten French sci-fi graphic novel… the kind you’d find wedged between Moebius collections and some obscure out-of-print RPG manual.
It’s not action-packed; it’s evocative. And that’s exactly why it works.
This is my kind of sci-fi, quiet, moody, and brimming with implied history. The Lost Tower doesn’t explain its world—it trusts your imagination to fill the gaps. It’s the same energy I got from Nausicaä’s glider sequences, old Moebius plates, or even those early weekend mornings spent flying across polygonal oceans in classic sims.
Florent Lebrun is a heavy hitter in concept art circles, and his fingerprints are unmistakable. His love for towering megastructures, lonely explorers, and fog-soaked worlds shines through. Add in Louis Lacoste’s airy, melancholic score…
…and you’ve got a short that feels like it stumbled out of a much larger universe.
If they ever turn this into a series, a worldbook, or even a game, I’ll be there with bells on.
You’ll see exactly why it’s kicking off Monday Spotlight.
Additional information:
Art by Florent Lebrun:
Music score by Louis Lacoste:
2 comments:
Geez, that would be a nice game. Reminds me of Sable, a little.
A more colourful version! :p
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