The focus was on the motion and the texture to make it believable. The challenge was to create every water movement like rain, waves, splashes, and white water with plastic pieces. We decided to turn our ocean into plastic materials to enhance the stop motion artistic direction. We later discovered that this technique helped us a lot! Thanks to those simulations we avoided many problems of interpenetrations for the fur. So, we did a “basic” rig and then we had to simulate all our animations to get those folds. The easiest way to get this effect is by animating in 12 fps, but we wanted to have our bears bend and fold like stuffed animals and to have some bounciness in their animation.
How do we create the stop motion effect in the animation? Soon after creating our characters, we moved onto our environmental assets. But in the end, we managed to create our 3D polar bears and brown bears. Re-sculpting an entirely new idea instead of re-drawing it took a lot more time.
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One thing every member of the team can agree on is that we are more comfortable in front of 3D software than in front of pen and paper, so most of our Look Development (even character design), was made by testing it directly in 3D. We chose to use stuffed animal characters and stop motion stylised assets for two reasons: to cover these highly charged and sensitive topics, and to better resonate with younger audiences. Then, we had to figure out how we wanted our film to look visually and why. One member of the team came up with the question, “what would happen if polar bears were forced to live among brown bears because of global warming.” We all agreed to base our project around this question. So, we chose various themes that we, members of the team and young people, are worried about: refugee crises, racism, and global warming. We wanted to make a short film that talks about society and current issues, but we didn't want it to focus on one specific subject. What story do we want to tell, and how do we want to tell it?