The planet of cute
The main protagonist in our animated sequences (next to Checker Tobi himself obviously) is planet earth in a variety of conditions. There's the beautiful blue marble, a dirty version of it and an ancient vulcano variant. All built to look like they were handmade in a kids room featuring small details like moss woods, plasticine mountains, papercut waves and beautiful illustrations from megaherz. And if you're not so interested in playfull cute things there's also manly VFX things like snowballs simulated to impact vulcano earth and melt to form oceans!
Toy cars, toy rockets, toy planes,.. toy everything!
To fill the scenes with life quite a lot of toy vehicle assets were created. Soft shapes, handmade look, lots of details - that was the briefing for them. And a few of our toy vehicles looked so good that they were promoted to a main role. So now a toy plane modeled after the real plane they used on location is opening the movie.
Oh! And also: big fucking exhaust plume rocket launch sequence anyone?
Childish Creatures
You can't have animation without a few creatures in our scenes. Our main one was the cutest (and probably also dumbest) Tardigrade we could find. Put them into space and you're in for one floaty ride.
As the Tardigrade really was a hero guy in one of the sequences quite a lot of fiddling went into the sculpting / texturing / animation process to make him appealing to the kids watching the film. And as we had Zbrush, Substance and all the other character centric programs fired up anyway we applied the same process to a tiny but lovely fish too.
Let it rain
The last chapter of the movie is a recap of everything we've seen before. It happens in strong rain and our challenge was, to render a notebook drenched in heavy pouring water. The simulations were done in Houdini like pretty much all sims for this project. Then we brought everything in Cinema4D and rendered with Octane.
Thank You Checker Tobi
for taking us on this incredible fun adventure!
And Thank You to all the nice people who were the crew
for a most awesome production time!
Credits
Production: megaherz
Coproduction: Bayerischer Rundfunk / ARD, Studio Babelsberg
Producer: Franz Gernstl, Oliver Gernstl, Fidelis Mager
Director: Martin Tischner
Animation Director: Robert Mayer
Music: Sonja Glas
Postproduction @ megaherz
Postproduction Supervisor: Florian Kohlert
Illustrations: Carolin Flammang, Anne Weberndörfer
Sounddesign: Oliver Görtz
Animation @ Aixsponza
Head of 3D: Christian Scheck, Matthias Zabiegly
Supervisor Aix: Tobias Müller
Producer Aix: Julian Fischer
3D Artists: Holger Aumüller, Jonas Rauber, Elisabeth Schlichtner, Stefan Voigt
Sculpting: Jens Kindler, Lars Korb, Nick Zieroff
Character Rigging & Animation: Leo Akinbiyi
VFX-Simulation: Martin Egger
Tracking: David Bobichon
Rendering: Christian Lachenschmidt