Blackmagic Cloud and Resolve Studio enabled collaboration for a hybrid stop motion/live action film between teams in three cities, achieving photoreal looks on a tight schedule and budget.
Ordures is a new stop motion and live action hybrid film with an environmental theme, created and directed by Foliascope in France and produced for broadcaster ARTE. Somewhat longer than a short, with a title that simply means ‘garbage’, the 48 minute film is a story about a disposable cup named Gobi, searching for his owner, and deals with waste, sustainability and similar themes.
The Foliascope team worked with DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic Cloud to set up post production workflows and connect teams working across France. They coordinated the live action unit Darjeeling in Paris, a stop motion and live action team in Valence, and VFX facility InTheBox in Annecy. Together, they combined photorealistic live action with stop motion animation.
Cloud at the Centre
Nicolas Flory, Artistic and Technical Director at Foliascope, served as the project’s supervising editor. “A cloud infrastructure was crucial to the production, especially for remote collaboration between the director and the rest of the Foliascope crew. It also ensured we could share each production phase with the director, DP, colourist, VFX/compositing team and production team,” Nicolas said.
“We made a deliberate choice to use Blackmagic Cloud as the centre of the creative process for the Ordures project to help us organise production and make the process straightforward. Department heads could track progress daily, and it allowed us to collectively troubleshoot and make technical decisions across live action, animation and post production.”
Photoreal on a TV Series Budget
Nicolas commented that one of the biggest challenges was delivering a photorealistic blend of live action and stop motion on a television series budget. This constraint required innovative solutions, including designing waterproofed puppet characters that could be animated in challenging real world environments, such as Parisian sewers and aquatic scenes.
Cloud collaboration in DaVinci Resolve Studio helped keep all aspects of the production on track. Live action scenes were shot first, and then edited and pregraded in DaVinci Resolve Studio.
“While animation and editorial were happening at Foliascope, the director was still shooting and editing new live action material in Paris. We shared the evolving timeline with the colourist remotely to pregrade the live action base before importing it into Dragonframe for stop motion animation,” said Nicolas.
For technical and creative tracking, Foliascope relied on a combination of DaVinci Resolve Studio and Autodesk ShotGrid (now called Flow) with Blackmagic Cloud’s Presentation mode for client review sessions and Fusion Studio for shot previsualisation and clean up, removing rigs and green screens before final compositing. “We could render out a timeline or segment quite easily, to share with anyone in the production team,” he noted.
With its environmental focus, the film has attracted support from organisations including Syctom, Alcome, Gestes Propres and Refashion. “Our goal was to make the trash feel truly alive while serving the story’s environmental message,” Nicolas noted.
“Having the Blackmagic Cloud-based hub really powered the whole production. By centralising everything through the cloud, we could collaborate directly, and stay on budget and on schedule. Honestly, without that set-up connecting everyone, a project like Ordures, with teams spread across multiple cities, just wouldn’t have worked.” www.blackmagicdesign.com
