Teddy Mate is a short film produced at USC during the fall 2018, and Directed by Rommel Villa. I was brought on board to help bring to life the magical story of a teddy bear who eventually transforms into a human. There were several really cool shots I was able to work on, such as this book transition. We shot the page of the book with some tracking markers, then I had one of the the production designers draw a sketch of the bear’s head that perfectly matched a screenshot from the following scene.

The hero shot of the film shows the full transformation from bear to human. This was a lot of fun to work on because of all the different layers of magic particles, hair and smoke. The morph was also a huge challenge to pull off, and involved several techniques, including the puppet warp and liquify filters in Adobe After Effects, and a morphing 3D model with a projection-mapped texture in Blender 3D. Here’s the shot in its (almost) entirety.

As the former bear and her companion walk into the distance, a pair of bear-shaped clouds watch from overhead. These were simulated in Blender and composited into the scene using After Effects.