What is the film about?

Bo and Moco live in an icy cold world. Moco is blaming the ice for his snotty nose and starts
melting it with his Bunsen Burner. At the same time Bo is trying to fix the damage with needle
and yarn.

What influenced it?

A little background information...

How was the film made?

Everything in this stop-motion film is handcrafted, except for the faces of our main characters Bo and Moco. In order to achieve the facial expressions we needed to tell the story, we added the faces digitally in 3D CGI.

For Eisnasen all of the techniques above seemed not suitable. We honestly think that our skills weren’t good enough to go for claymation since you have to sculpt every single frame. And the head mechanics and the replacement faces were financially out of reach. Especially for the replacement faces we would have had to build to many faces for the animationlevel we had in mind. Therefore we came up with a new mixed media approach.
For his Bachelor’s degree, Joel used to study  3D animation😎

In order to solve the problem of the facial animation in stop-motion, he tried to find a way to combine those two techniques.

The idea was to animate the puppets on the set and add the faces in 3D CGI afterwards. Instead of a face, the puppets had a lot tracking markers. Those were used to recreate the movement in digital 3D space.

The most important thing to find out was: How many Trackers do we need for a satisfying result? Unfortunately a lot!

The new combined technique we developed for Eisnasen also had an impact on our design. We wanted to reduce the use of 3D CGI to the faces only, otherwise we would have to animate the whole head digitally. Our solution was to let them wear hoods the whole time. This creates a natural mask we used to fit in the digitally created facial animation. Luckily the whole story is set in an icy cold world, where every character needs a hoody to keep themselves warm (Not everyone has an ice fleece to do that like Bo)
Once the puppets were built in real life we made 3D scans of them. That way they had the exact measurements to fit in the 3D Faces of Moco an Bo. In the end we managed to create a process to combine stop-motion and CGI for the facial animation.

To finish a shot it took multiple stages:

• Animate the shot on the set with the real puppets.
• Track all the trackingmarkers to recreate the same movement digitally.
• Adjust the CGI face on to the tracked movement.
• Animate the CGI face.
• Set the Lighting with the help of HDRI’s from the Set.
• Put everything together and mask where necessary.
• Et voilà! Easy!