PortfolioCamera
& Editing

The rabbit was built using conventional modelling methods, following a YouTube tutorial by the channel SouthernShotty. To avoid a complete meltdown of my MacBook, I used a wool texture with a normal map instead of sculpting the rabbit's fur. The rabbit's face was animated with shape keys and a pivot point in the centre of the skull. Characters are normally given complex rigs, but this was quicker and sufficient for the short animation. There is, however, a skeleton running through the rabbit that uses inverse kinematics to align the bones naturally during animation, letting the ears swing about.

For the carrot I used a soap-bubble shader, implemented with the help of a YouTube tutorial by Blenderian.

This is where the world was built for the first time. The nodes below define the material of the fence. For this I used a texture pack from the website polyhaven.com by 3D artist Amal Kumar.

The remaining objects — the hills, the grass and the clouds — were modelled by hand and shaped using shaders.

Alongside the shading, lighting is absolutely crucial to the look. It's what gives the film its impact and makes the objects stand out from one another. Since we want to reproduce a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional screen, it's hugely important to fake that depth through visual layers. Contrasts in brightness and colour — such as complementary colours, shadows or a blue shift into the distance — create a sense of depth and are what make the image attractive and interesting in the first place.

In this screenshot, light sources are shown as a small sun or as light cones. The light cones mimic warm sunlight, while the small suns provide fill light, edge light and colour contrast in general.

The rabbit was animated with shape keys on the face and standard keyframes for the rest of the body. Only the ears were solved with inverse kinematics. The animation took four weekends in total. The idea of the rabbit turning into a soap bubble only came up during the process. The Boolean operations for it really made the computer break a sweat, and the render time with path tracing came to almost 20 hours.

The final polish came through adjustments in After Effects such as colour, vignette, blur and a touch of film grain. The sound design was created in DaVinci Resolve and the music matched to the video. Timo composed the xylophones and strings that come in a few seconds after the soap-bubble carrots appear.