As part of RTÉ’s 2023 Christmas Campaign, I was approached to create three idents, centering the idea of community and events that bring people together.
Over the course of 5 weeks I rolled up my sleeves and, together with my team at Matchbox Mountain, got started on 3D previsualisation, modelling & 3D printing and feeding our miniature painting & set building crews.
The Tree Lighting
The animatic for the Tree Lighting. It was integral to the project timeline and budget to figure out as much as possible in this early stage and using Blender enabled a very speedy and practical solution. I could use my 3D assets to define exactly the dimensions our set needed to be, which really aided in the rapid prototyping of the props, buildings and characters.
From my blocking the great Eachen Chen worked up the location designs and added all the important detailing needed to make it feel like a wee community.
The Grotto
The animatic for the Grotto. This one was particularly tricky as I knew we would not have time to make two versions of the kids going in and out of the grotto with presents, so the choreography needed to be really tight so they made sense when we composited the different plates all together.
An alternate idea on the grotto scene, using a layer cake zoetrope format, with skipping elves orbiting the Grotto. Being able to quickly demonstrate different scenes and what they may look like was particularly successful in honing in on the client’s intention.
The Sea Swim
An alternative angle for this scene. It seemed too similar compositionally to the other two scenes, so I decided to mix it up with lateral movement.
Animatic for the Sea Swim. This was somewhat more involved than the other scenes due to the amount of moving parts on screen.
Here’s an overview of the whole scene with the initial plan for the wave mechanisms.
The Townsfolk
While I was locking in the animatic and set design, my good pal Lily Bernard did a bunch of snazzy character concepts to help inspire my sculpting.
Above is a selection of the characters I sculpted in Blender. Overall I had about 30 characters to sculpt over the course of a week. Thankfully the wooden toy style worked in my favour and I tried to work as modular as possible, especially when it came to the characters with outfit variations. This way we could use the same heads with different bodies and save some painting time!
Once I finished a character I spit it out to my 3D printer. I had it running non-stop for about 4 weeks, printing both characters and props.
Above you can see the fab work of our painting team, including Jessie Flynn, Hollie Leddy Flood, Aoife Balfe, Aidan O’Sullivan, Angel Lynch, Silvio Severino & Rob O’Sullivan. All of our work took place at Space Forms, in Ballymount. Thanks to Frank Prendergast & Sara Murphy for hosting us and for all their fabrication assistance!
We were very grateful to have Paul McDonnell and his team of set builders, including Ger Clancy, Ciaran Bonner, Hannah Murray & Aidan Fox, putting together our locations. They used a mixture of traditional modelmaking techniques along with laser cutting and 3D printing, which really helped with the short turn around.
Once our sets arrived we started getting them camera ready with a last bit of set dressing and getting our lights all set up. Above you see me mapping out our character positions based on their coordinates in the 3D pre-visualisations.
A timelapse of the Tree Lighting scene.
Once I finished animating a shot, Pádraig Fagan and Aidan O’Sullivan would disassemble and remove one set and swap in the next. We had it down to pretty speedy turnaround. At this point I would make any lighting adjustments and strike the set for our puppet positions and start into animation all over again!
Many thanks to John Kilkenny & Darragh Treacy at RTÉ for giving us the opportunity and to Laurence O’Byrne for thinking of us!