For the second year in a row, IGA Canada, Sid Lee, and Tonic DNA trusted Nebula with another holiday film. This time, we were responsible for supervising and animating the fable section of the story, focusing on expressive, emotional character animation that aligned with the director’s vision.
The fable plays a key role in the film and was animated at 12fps to give it a stop-motion feel. With no dialogue, performance and personality were everything. We carefully shaped each character’s acting, adding small details and visual gags throughout to support the story and bring the world to life.
On an international, remote, multi-studio production, a solid and efficient pipeline is essential. From day one, the focus was on building a setup that allowed teams to collaborate smoothly while staying flexible and creative.
This meant organizing and managing our internal team and tools, while making sure workflows between all partner studios ran seamlessly. An Alembic-based pipeline was implemented, allowing different software to coexist: Maya for rigging, animation, and hair; Cinema 4D for modeling, shading, and lighting.
Assets moved easily between departments, and to avoid wasting time on file management, we set up a cloud-based system with carefully filtered automatic syncing. This ensured each artist had access only to the assets they needed, while also handling version control and duplicate detection—freeing the team to focus on what mattered most: the work itself.
