“What would happen if underwaterlife, which has been continuously impacted and contaminated by human pollution in recent years, changed and adapted to it?” In their animation short film “Hybrids,” a group of five French students from MoPA, a school of computer graphics animation, attempted to respond (surreally) to this question.
A scene of natural life in the depths of the sea that has been dramatically altered by the external and profoundly polluting agents that men (consciously or unconsciously) pour into the sea on a daily basis was enacted by the MoPA students over the course of an entire year of work in a classic French style with an impossible and incredibly creative tone.
This has brought about new animals, crossovers, between the remaining parts of human waste and marine fauna.
Therefore, the five boys’ inventiveness becomes apparent in this location. In fact, we find a wide variety of creatures, but they are an excellent illustration of creative application: crabs covered in bottle tops, sharks merging with vintage American cars, and fish merging with the same barrels of chemicals that frequently mark their demise in large quantities are all examples of pot-shelled turtles.
This body can be counted 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 Autodesk Maya. Partly it is a brief denunciation of human vilification of nature, and part it is a manifest creative expression.
In addition to Autodesk’s main software and the Marcos Fajardo-developed rendering engine, Zbrush is extensively used to sculpt all of the minute variations and details that define the models.
This making-of lets us peek behind the scenes at the creative and working process, which is just as interesting and surprising.
In order to guarantee this, the team carefully conducted extensive pre-production research to determine how to define the design of the creatures and which human objects to select in relation to the original shapes of the various sea creatures (the impressive fusion of an airplane hull and a giant octopus head).
Each figure on the team is both an expert in computer graphics in general and a specialist in a particular field.
They were able to maintain a monstrous professionalism thanks to this trait, which undoubtedly paid off the year they spent working on the realization.
The short film won “Best in Show” at the 2018 Siggraph in Vancouver, Best Animated Short at Sitges and NanoCon, Audience Award at Cineclass, and a variety of other prizes throughout the year because of the positive reception it received at these events and competitions.
