Creative studio Fabian&Fred harnessed Adobe Creative Cloud, Blender, and DaVinci Resolve, bolstered by GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs, creating an authentic reflection of a little girl’s fear and her discovery of the true meaning of bravery.
The NVIDIA Studio blog has shared another animated short film project. The latest, I Am Not Afraid! by creative studio Fabian&Fred, co-founded by Fabian Driehost and Frederic Schuld, draws inspiration from childhood experiences and was brought to life using Adobe Creative Cloud, Blender, and DaVinci Resolve — all powered and accelerated by GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs.
The studio’s creative workflow, bolstered by GeForce RTX GPU, shows how powerful graphics cards accelerate difficult and complex workflows on smaller projects.
For almost a decade, Driehost and Schuld have focused on relatable narratives, stories understood by audiences of all ages, while not shying away from complex emotional and social topics. In I Am Not Afraid! the creative team strives to embody childlike wonder, curiosity, and imagination.
The film’s concept originated when director and Norwegian native Marita Mayor shared significant childhood experiences with the team, impacting the work’s visual-layer-based, flat, minimal style and an appropriate color system.
The 2D animated short features a little girl named Vanja who discovers being brave means facing your own fears and learning that everyone - even the bigger personalities in this world - is scared now and again. By combining structures from nature, brush strokes for texture, and a kid’s voice, the film creates an authentic reflection of Vanja’s fear.
Work began in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of creative apps, with multiple characters created in Adobe Photoshop. These characters were then prepared and rigged in Adobe Animate. An animatic created in Premiere Pro tested out the voices and sounds of the animated characters.
3D assets were modeled in Blender with Blender Cycles RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing in the viewport, ensuring interactive modeling with sharp graphical output. At the same time, the team used Adobe Illustrator with the GPU-accelerated canvas to create large, detailed backgrounds. As a result, the creative team could pan across and zoom in and out of their complex vector graphics smoothly and interactively.
Assets and backgrounds returned to Adobe Animate for staging with a mix of frame-by-frame and rig animation techniques. Next, sound production was completed with the digital audio app ProTools, with the composite work completed in Adobe After Effects. Finally, for color correction, Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve RTX GPU-accelerated, AI-powered auto-color-correct feature improved hues and contrast. A few manual touch-ups finished everything off.
Watch the I'm Not Afraid! (Ich habe keine Angst!) trailer, then head over to NVIDIA’s Blogspot to learn more about the project.
Source: NVIDIA Studio Blog
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
