Wood Trolls 

Wood Trolls was an incredibly fun story to animate. It was inspired by my own childhood summers, and my little brother’s inexplicable fear of what he thought were wood trolls that lived near the woods of our house. He would call my dad to pick him up from a friends house instead of biking home because he didn’t want to walk past the forest.

I wanted to remind everyone of their childhood summers with this short, or evoke some sort of nostalgia. I intentionally left out phones, earbuds, or anything else kids might have on them that would link them to a certain decade.

As for the process, I animated all of my rigs in Maya, and alembic cached the characters to Cinema 4D. There I applied textures, made a forest set, and included a metaball and thinking particle based fire. As always in my personal work, I like to blur the lines of 2D and 3D, so I used only a luminance channel for the fire and the embers coming off of it. I also used just a 2D image and alpha on a plane with shadow casters to project shadows of the angry monsters on the forest behind Eli.