After smelling something fishy during a test, schoolteacher Mrs. Gubbins transforms into a massive bear and hunts down cheating students.

BEAR

In voiceover from his 2005 documentary on daredevil naturalist Timothy Treadwell, filmmaker Werner Herzog narrates:

“And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears…I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”

This terrifying indifference was what I hoped to capture in creating this sequence. Throughout the storyboarding, design, and animation, my challenge was to avoid anthropomorphizing my bear character in order to create an effective animation. This creature was not a human who chooses to become a monster, but rather a monster that hides as a human. I referenced monster movies featuring dinosaurs, chimpanzees, and alien reptiles that did not behave with a recognizable personality or agenda.

This project presented numerous firsts for me. I felt more comfortable modeling instead of sculpting the bear anatomy because it allowed me to UV unwrap the model for texture painting as I was making it. I wanted the bear to be stylized but not cartoonish, and hoped that this shape language could contrast the naturalistic animation style, evoking a natural circular design that is wild and heavy like a crashing wave.

The quadruped rigging process presented an interesting challenge. There was no off-the-shelf bear rig that would work with my stylized design, so I rigged the model from scratch using a dog armature for the front half connected to a pair of human armature legs. This bizarre process is due to the fact that bears, like humans, use plantigrade (flat of the foot) locomotion when walking, as opposed to dogs which are digitigrade (toe) walkers. Brush strokes on transparency were parented to individual bones along the spine and head to break up the silhouette.

STUDENTS

Haida Formline is a style of art that originates in the cultural tradition of the indigenous Haida people of Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. The art style has informed the folk art styles of much of the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up admiring it for its dynamism, color, and zoomorphic design. The students’ faces are based on wooden masks that would historically be worn during ceremonies by the Haida and related Pacific Northwest Coastal Tribes. The masks of the boys in this story were designed by myself and are not based off of any one single mask.

Because I made the students without knowing exactly what the bear’s exact animation would look like, I animated all five in line reacting to the bear walking behind them. After animating the bear, I chose which students I wanted to be in front of the camera and offset their animations based on their relative position to the bear.

TREES

The classroom of trees was based on Western Red Cedars native to the Pacific Northwest, created by digitally painting and projection mapping onto basic tapered cylinder objects. A black and white version of the painted textures were used to displace the geometry so that the trees could have interactive lighting in the scene. All of the trees are on the same texture map so that different surfaces can be chosen quickly depending on their placement in the shot.

STORYBOARD

The original storyboard of this sequence featured Mrs. Gubbins still as a teacher before she transforms. This character model was sculpted and painted to test out NPR shaders and texture painting workflows. Many aspects of this project found their way onto the final bear model featured above, including a fuzzy edge shader and a process of shading that uses multiple sets of emissive textures to mimic stylized lighting.