Francesco P. D'Elia
“What would happen if underwater life, continually contaminated and influenced by human pollution in recent years, underwent a change, adapting to it?“
This is the question to which a group of five French students from MoPA, a school of computer graphics animation, tried to give a (surreal) answer, in their animation short film “Hybrids“.
Developed over an entire year’s work, the MoPA students, in a classic French style with an impossible and incredibly creative tone, enacted a scene of natural life in the depths of the sea profoundly changed by the external and profoundly polluting agents that man consciously or unconsciously pours into the sea on a daily basis.
This has resulted in new creatures, indeed hybrids, between the remains of human waste and marine fauna.
Here, then, the inventiveness of the five boys becomes evident. In fact, we find all sorts of creatures, but they present a perfect example of applied creativity: turtles that have pots as their shells, crabs covered with bottle tops, sharks that have become mergers with vintage American cars, and fish that merge with the same barrels of chemicals that many times mark their demise in large quantities.
Partly a short denunciation of human vilification of nature, partly a manifest creative expression, this body can count on an impressive visual rendering, thanks to well-considered lighting and materials and the exemplified computing power of Arnold render, the standard rendering engine in Maya.
For the realisation, in addition to the rendering engine developed by Marcos Fajardo and Autodesk’s main software, we also find the massive use of Zbrush, to sculpt all the small variations and details that minutely define the models.
In this making of, we can discover the creative and working process hidden behind the scenes, which is no less surprising and interesting.
In order to ensure this, the guys took care in the development of a thorough pre-production research, aimed at figuring out how to define the design of the creatures and which human artefacts to choose in relation to the original shapes of the various sea creatures (the fusion between the hull of an aeroplane and the head of a giant octopus is impressive).
In the team, each figure is both a generalist and specific to a particular area of computer graphics.
This characteristic allowed them to maintain a monstrous professionalism that certainly repaid the year spent on the realisation.
The result of this work in fact met with positive favour at many events and competitions that awarded the short film “Best in Show” at the 2018 Siggraph in Vancouver, Best Animated Short at Sitges and NanoCon, Audicence Award at Cineclass and many other prizes, all earned during the course of this year.
