Personal

During the summer holidays of 2020 due to the pandemic we decided to escape from civilization for a few days in a nearby place: L'Albufera de València.

The experience of traveling through these landscapes on a motorcycle inspired us to make this small piece.

Our main jobs have made spending time on side projects difficult, but it feels great to be able to share projects that really mean something personal!

We normally do shorter and less ambitious projects. However, although it is not a large production, this time we wanted to make a piece with a lot of love. We even managed to involve our great friend Miguel Sanz to design this fabulous poster for us!

For us inspiration always comes from the real world. The slice of life is something that really inspires us, so if we live an experience that really meant a beautiful/funny/whatever moment we try to convey it in our art.

In this case we were visiting Gandía, so we decided to rent a motorcycle to visit the famous Albufera de València. On the way back it started to get dark, so it was that precise moment when we were watching the sunset while the summer wind hit us in the face that inspired us to make this little piece of animation.

Since we wanted to make a project with more care, we dedicated a lot of time to creating the characters, the assets, the landscape, ...

The feel of the wind on the characters was especially important to us, so we decided to use Marvelous Designer for the t-shirts.

Since the characters were going to have slight reactions we created a small facial rig system

We are especially proud of our sneakers and our beloved/hated Barcelona/Alicante Talgo!

We have always been a little lazy, but that makes us find smart solutions! So to make the camera animation easier we moved the entire set and kept the characters in the center of the scene.

⬆️ Render Magic ⬇️

With a good base of design and modeling of the characters, getting to a good point in shading is not a difficult task, but we still worked on the colors and textures to make them feel simple and pleasing to the eye.

We wanted to convey the nostalgic sensations of summer sunsets, so working on the light was very important, emphasizing certain elements such as the color of the sky with respect to reality.

It was also important to create a set rich in details, to make the background mountains feel Mediterranean, the typical vegetation such as rice fields or cypresses, but with a certain simplification to stylize the scene.

For this we have started to use Geometry Nodes in Blender, very useful to parameterize and populate certain elements of the set.

Finally, for the sound part, we first made a simple SFX layer with some foleys in order to add to the chill mood, and we worked on a music layer based on some loops.

Thanks!