3D Animation for Good: Creating the World of “Panchita!” How a 3D studio from Brooklyn teamed up with a non-profit organization that builds homes in South America.
For 25 years the youth-led NGO TECHO has been helping people living in poverty in South America by building homes for families in 18 countries. Recently, Brooklyn-based Unsaid Studios partnered with TECHO to help raise awareness about their good work by developing a 3D character for the NGO’s Instagram posts.
Inspired by TECHO’s heartwarming mission, the Unsaid team used Cinema 4D and Redshift to create a trailer for a five-minute short film called “Panchita!” Based on a true story, the trailer introduces viewers to a six-year-old South American girl who lives in a favela (an informal settlement) and dreams about tap dancing.
Full of tropical colors and and set in an almost toy-like miniature world, the trailer teases the five-minute “Panchita!” film that TECHO and Unsaid Founder and Creative Director Doug Bello are currently working on. The goal is to make more people aware that over 200 million people live in poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean and how TECHO is making a difference.
We talked with Bello about Unsaid Studio’s work with TECHO, the making of “Panchita!” and the GoFundMe campaign they’ve launched to help support the film.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and the team at Unsaid Studio.
Bello: I’m the director of Unsaid Studio, and we’re a design and motion company in New York with ties to artists in Brazil and the UK. We work for brands and agencies all over the world, doing a wide range of projects. We really enjoy creative problem solving, utilizing our team’s overlapping skills and Cinema 4D ties in well with that approach.
How did you come up with the idea to make a film?
Bello: TECHO came to us to develop a 3D character to use in their Instagram posts, and once we started to research and learn more about how they improve the lives of people living in poverty, we had to help. We had the idea to offer them a short movie, something unique, and they loved the idea, so we started writing a story.
During our research, we read about Emilia, a 15-year-old TECHO volunteer, who was on a TECHO construction project when she saw a little girl come running in and jump up and down screaming, "Mommy we have a floor! We have a floor!" Emilia got really emotional about someone giving so much value to a floor, so the film was inspired by that story and others like it.
Tell us about how you created the sand the little girl walks through in the trailer.
Bello: The sand is one of the main characters in the movie as it plays a big role in telling the story. It was really important to find a way to show it clearly, so during our research we decided it would be nice to exaggerate the size of the grains to match the movie’s visual style.
But we also wanted to have the physics of real sand. To do that, we used alembic to export the animated characters to Houdini to make a simulation. Next, we exported another alembic with the points simulation and used Redshift to distribute ten different models of grains and render it. We’re really happy with the results.
Was the 5-minute length of the project a challenge?
Bello: Everything involved in the short film format is a huge challenge. Managing the complexity of all the characters and scenes, and especially telling a compelling and interesting story in the shortest amount of time possible. We are still in production and have about 45 shots so far.
Tell us about the production process.
Bello: Cinema 4D and Redshift are always our tools of choice, and Maxon was very kind to offer us help with licenses and workflow once they learned about TECHO’s work. We have animators, modelers, lighters and other team members collaborating from all over the world, so we relied heavily on Xrefs to build and manage the animation.
We met virtually on Zoom, and that approach allowed us to have multiple people working on the same scene at the same time, each artist bringing their specialty to the project. Artists render preview versions of the scenes, and we use SyncSketch, another partner on the film, to review and add online revision notes and comments to guide further refinement.
Where can people find more information about the film and TECHO?
Bello: More details can be found on Unsaid’s website and on Instagram. All of the contributions to the GoFundMe go directly to TECHO to support the making of the film to promote their work.
Do you think Unsaid will take on other projects like this?
Bello: Making “Panchita!” has been the best feeling ever. Working on something positive, helping people and doing what we love was a real boost for all of us. TECHO had no restrictions, so we’ve been able to experiment, try different ideas and have more freedom than we do with client projects.
It would really be a dream to work on more projects like these, making a real difference in people's lives. We would love to go from here to creating an entire series or even a feature film.