Baleària: 3D Animation

Once again, we received a call from the folks at Felicidad Collective to work on a project. In this case, it was the annual New Year's Eve campaign for the ferry company Baleària.

The project was initially conceived as a short video, no longer than a minute and a half, in stop-motion style. But as the process progressed, the project turned into a much longer video that also required much more detailed development.

We started out with a small boutique project and ended up with a large-scale production that fell to the creative trio at FIEL®. Three heads, three hearts... and only six hands.

At the beginning of the project, Felicidad contributed various images created with artificial intelligence, from which certain aspects were randomly selected for the construction of the characters and the environment.

These were approximations of the universe that our studio later developed in its entirety.

The style testing phase was dizzying: it was the work of a single afternoon. From there, we arrived at two paths... Finally, they chose the Santa Claus on the right (whom we continue to iterate on, as expected).

But the adaptations don't end there.

We were also responsible for modeling the Margarita Salas ship!

Then came a major challenge:

Achieving a synthesis of style between our research and the references provided earlier.

We had to imagine what the mascots would look like, what the reindeer would look like... and what style the rest of the characters would have, since Santa Claus deserved to be unique.

It was a relentless race for balance.

On more than one occasion, we found it interesting to use the same frames as the photographs provided by the client in order to recreate the settings.

It was a very entertaining exercise in which we had to find the right way to simplify and style that would work perfectly with the art direction.

The client needed renders that emphasized what they wanted to highlight: the possibility of traveling with unlimited luggage and also with pets and vehicles.

Various compositions were created for the MUPI format, but in the end, they were not used.

Here is a selection of stills from the video.

A poster that never was:

The video is filled with elements and details, but we always opted for simplicity and cleanliness. We didn't want to overload the environments.

Here is a sample of the many assets we modeled for this project.

Originally, the video was over 3:30 long. We had to make numerous cuts. The original animatic and some of those scenes that didn't make it are here... although without the necessary adjustments, of course.