The film's style stemmed from the interest of incorporating 2D and 3D together, mainly for the interesting and appealing look, but also for the simplistic construction of the models as we were on a time budget afterall! A lot of tests and research went into this, and we eventually landed upon the idea of digitally painting the far away objects and rendering the characters and close objects in 3D, which would then be composited together.

To incorporate these two different mediums together, we made sure to have an illustrative look between the 2D paintings and 3D object's textures; utilising a rough black outline on the paintings and almost pencil scratched outlines on the 3D objects.

My role on the project was primarily Direction and Art Direction, concentrating primarily on designing the world of 'Lowen' and its inhabitants, along with writing the story of how the characters venture through the landscape. My main interest for this project was designing and creating a 3D translation of these 2D designs while still maintaining the heart of the original designs.

As the project went along, I took on a lot of extra work; I had to figure out how to light the 3D environments and characters within Arnold Renderer, creating the materials and surfaces for each object, and also render them out within a limited amount of time. I ended up resorting to rendering out different key parts of a shot separately so that compositing those together was easier and also sped up the rendering process as the load was distributed amongst many of the computers available.

Once I had rendered every shot, I moved to learning how to composite together the 2D paintings with the 3D renders within After Effects, using such techniques as 3D camera tracking to immerse the 2D Backgrounds as though they were 3D.