Something’s Awry With Maxon’s Holiday Message Gather round for a story about an enchanting candy forest and a devious cookie crook.

Holiday videos usually feature the same lineup of heroes and villains, but when Maxon commissioned Something’s Awry Productions to create a short film to celebrate the season, the Pennsylvania-based studio dreamed up “Clash of the Cookie Crook!” an unsettling tale in which two tiny heroes must subdue a cookie thief that’s been terrorizing a candy forest.

We talked with Something’s Awry Lead Animator Kris Theorin about the short, which was based on a classic holiday poem by his brother Kurtis and inspired by “The Night Before Christmas.”

Theorin: Yes, we saved some time by repurposing the candy forest we created for the Halloween short. Then, we modeled all of the new forest assets from scratch in Cinema 4D from jellybean rocks and cotton candy trees to hard candy flowers. We also added details to the trees to create a slightly festive look and turned the grassy forest floor into a snowy landscape.

We wanted to cram the film full of as many Maxon Easter eggs as possible, and the fruitcake and cookie props were the perfect opportunity to do so! That involved sneaking in as many logos as we could onto things like the box and the icing of the cookies. We also loved the idea of having several Maxon-related references and puns, so be sure to look carefully on the branding of the fruitcake.

Theorin: Kurtis’ holiday poem allowed us to easily clue the viewer to what was happening while also establishing the holiday feel we wanted from the short. From there, we created a script and storyboards to hash out the details. Once we were feeling good about the direction, we started production. The whole process was just over three months start to finish.

Theorin: To cut down on production time, we created the main characters as two variations on one model. We used ZBrush to build the main character and then mixed and matched pre-made armor assets and some other custom detail to round out the character.

The Cookie Crook was challenging as it had to hold up to extreme closeups so, in this case, we used detailed photo scans in the materials and finished it off with a layer of C4D hair.

Our extensive use of motion capture made it possible to complete the animation in just under a week. Everything from the giant human hand to the hero characters was animated using motion capture suits provided by Noitom. Without that, the animation could have taken almost a month and involved a substantially larger team.

Theorin: For me, the most interesting part was giving a motion capture performance using only my hands. Since the antagonist of the short is a pair of giant, disembodied and rather festive hands, I had to use a special motion capture suit this time around.

The suit, the Perception Neuron Studio with Studio Gloves, allows each of my individual fingers to be recorded, so I was able to imbue the character with some kind of personality.

For the other short films I’ve done, I’ve used every part of my body to communicate the character through mocap. But when you strip it down to just the hands, any acting decision I make is amplified because of how huge the character is. So it took many takes, and lots of trial and error, to really nail down what I wanted to do with the character from scene to scene. In the end, though, I’m really proud of how much personality I was able to squeeze into this character despite the challenges!

Theorin: We used Redshift for both look dev and final rendering, leaning heavily on subsurface scattering shaders to get the gummy, translucent look of most of the objects in the scene. Everything was put together in After Effects, utilizing Red Giant Looks, Optical Glow, Renoiser and Colorista to achieve the final look you see in the film.

Theorin: We've recently dived headfirst into the world of influencer marketing! After several personal projects we created went viral on Instagram, we started creating posts for various companies to promote their latest products.

We’ve also been shopping around a number of original series, as well as a short, animated film that's in the very early stages of pre-production and we hope to get back to it once we have the time next year.