As part of the final year of the Digital Arts & Entertainment curriculum, I had to create a 1-minute film along with five other students from both the animation and VFX majors. Fellow teammate Ines (Rae) van Assche pitched her idea for a film to a team of teachers that were supervising us throughout the 12/13-week period. Her idea eventually got approved and she was looking for students to join her team. As the original idea was heavily inspired by the jungles from the Avatar franchise, I was highly motivated to help out on this project.

While there was already an animatic for the pitch, we had to try and reform the story a little bit. At the end of week 3, we needed to have a final draft for the shotlist and storyline.

During the actual production, we were reminded how ambitious the project actually was. However, our supervisors believed it was possible to be realised within the time period of the course. We were, however, advised to use a completely different pipeline than originally planned. We were originally planning on creating a lot in 3D. The problem was that the forest in the story was too big and it was not possible complete such a big environment on time. Therefore, we were strongly advised to go for a matte painting and compositing route.

To realise all of this within a few weeks, we were confronted with THE technology we were all pretty sceptical of and that we maybe even despised: AI. Making all matte paintings and its assets by hand would take way too long, so we had to use AI to create the 2D assets and layers. This was the first time where I actually used AI overall.