StoryBots

When I joined Feed Me Light, my first project was a series of five educational shorts for Netflix’s StoryBots: Answer Time, covering nouns, verbs, adjectives, wrinkly fingers and desert heat. Three used the series’ colourful 3D style. Desert and Wrinkly Fingers instead looked like stop-motion films made from paper and everyday objects.

The aim was to build images as if their materials really existed. Desert’s cacti resemble origami, its rocks crumpled paper and its sun a bottle cap. Folds, imperfections and material thickness were built into the modelling and textures rather than added as a surface effect.

On Desert, I took every shot from layout through to its final look. I built, textured and shaded the environments, prepared the layouts for character animation, then handled lighting and effects, including paper heat waves and melting chocolate.

For Wrinkly Fingers, I worked on the boat, duck and splash using the same handmade approach. Rather than simulating the splash, I animated its shapes frame by frame in Blender, switching their visibility to recreate the stepped rhythm of stop-motion.

On the other three shorts, my contribution was more focused: compositing screens and integrating 2D elements. The project also introduced me to Maya and Redshift, and gave me hands-on experience of a studio pipeline across several stages of production.