Rosie and the Rainbow

For many children their formative years are tied to hospitals for all manner of healthcare requirements and this is often accompanied by stress and rife with uncertainty. Fortunately, exceptional children’s charities such as the Theodora Foundation  have the Giggle Doctors, who strive to give children momentary magical escapes through performative arts, stimulating their imaginations and giving them the tools to face their fears and contribute to their development and well-being.

The folks over at Unit9  asked us to join them and Directors Luke & Joe along with the team at Havas Geneva, to animate and composite a spooky shadow monster for a short film written with children from hospitals in Switzerland to raise awareness of Theodora’s important work.

Making a Monster 

We recruited creepy monster aficionado artist Ruby Taylor to join us in designing our ominous shadowy figure, AKA ‘The Nothing’. The Nothing, being symbolic of children’s fears and uncertainty within the hospital setting, needed to reflect this feeling of unease in being everchanging, ominous, dark and of course a little bit creepy.

The initial direction explored asked the question ‘just how creepy can we go?’ Which we certainly obliged in our initial sketches, with sprawling tendrils and large sharp yellowed teeth. This was softened to a loose humanoid shape, the creepiness was maintained with long spindly fingers and sharp teeth, all topped off with ominous red glowing eyes but less liable to excessively haunting the audience. 

The monster was beautifully animated by Ruby who captured its fluid movements via 2D hand drawn animation in Photoshop, this was animated over the top of the live action edit so that the animation could be lined up and timed to fit neatly within the scene. Once approved we took the 2D animation into After Effects where we composited the animation into the already graded footage.

One of the most significant factors when compositing was having the shadow conform to the shape walls, cast into the scene as if by an unseen entity. We initially explored taking the tracked footage into C4D and physically projecting the shadow onto a 3D mockup of the set, however in this instance we achieved the same effect by using 3D layers in AE and creating panels that deformed the shadow as it slunk across the scene.

We also produced a few additional VFX touches throughout as well as the shadow monster. This involved bleeding colour in and out of the rainbow drawing alongside a paper chameleon as well as a lovely rainbow glow emanating from Rosies bag as she manages to find the rainbow again as the video concludes.

We certainly loved working on this project but it goes without saying it’s about more than the sum of its parts and wouldn’t have been possible without not just the amazing team who filmed and produced it but the fantastic work of the Giggle Doctors and children involved.

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