Once again, Canadian grocery retailer IGA partnered with Sid Lee and Tonic DNA for their 2023 holiday campaign. Operating as the CG & Animation Supervisor through Nebula, I led the animation team responsible for the entire fable section of the film.
The commercial features a grandfather teaching his granddaughters how to bake a Yule log while telling a story about a selfish beaver. My objective was to translate the director’s vision into clear, readable character performances. I focused on defining the emotional arcs and comedic timing of the woodland animals, ensuring their actions drove the narrative forward without the aid of dialogue.
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.
