As students at MoPA, the five co-directors of Hybrids had committed to a rigorous five-year program studying the art and technology of computer graphics and animation. For their final graduation project, Florian Brauch, Matthieu Pujol, Kim Tailhades, Yohan Thireau, and Romain Thirion teamed up around their complementary skills and interests to create a short film. “Each one of us had his or her own strong fields,” Pujol says. “Florian was the animator, for instance, and I was the effects artist. We had a lighter [Tailhades], a compositing artist [Thirion], and an animator and rigger as well [Thireau].”

The students quickly identified a compelling topic to showcase in their graduate film. “Four of us grew up by the sea, and it was why we chose the pollution issue,” Brauch says. “The idea came from Romain, who’s from Cannes in the south of France. He used to dive to gaze at the underwater animals. As time went by, he noticed less and less fish and more and more trash. Every time he would spot something shiny buried in the sand, thinking it was some interesting form of life, it turned out to be a bottle cap instead.”

Once the team members settled on the idea of hybrids, they began developing the film’s cast of characters. “We started with some of the most iconic underwater creatures,” Pujol says. For each character—shark, grouper, crabs, turtle, vulture—team members found a specific personality and matched it to trash that would help it adapt to survive. The grouper, for example, was hybridized with an oil drum merged into its bulky, rounded shape.

Once the designs were established, the team sculpted 3D versions of the characters in ZBrush, then used Maya to rig and animate them. The creatures were textured with Substance Painter to blend flesh with nonorganic objects. “We wanted to show the pain and suffering in that—something that’s far from a fairy tale,” Pujol explains. “It was all about texturing.” Iterating quickly, the team then tried various character interactions: grouper attacking turtle, shark attacking turtle. To find the flow for the movie, they realized they had to go into previsualization quickly. “We needed to be able to see the movie, to feel the timing, the framing of all the shots, the animation, to make sure that it was working,” he says.

Early on in production, the members of the Hybrids team realized they had too many ideas and too little time. After bringing their ideas together in storyboards, “we wanted to try everything quickly to know if it was doable or not,” Brauch says. Tests and R&D helped merge and shape ideas, and the team rapidly switched to 3D previsualization to lock in the key moments of the film. The goal was to avoid redoing the same shots and sequences multiple times.

“Pipeline-wise, we wanted to be able to iterate very quickly,” Pujol says. “Maya and Arnold were very efficient in rendering what we needed for the water environment. Arnold’s .ass file format helped us import assets from Houdini to Maya in a seamless way. Then it was just a matter of compositing and editing after that.” Each day, the team reviewed dailies knowing that “we didn't have the luxury of time to waste on something that won’t make the cut.” The students also learned to be smart with hardware resources to avoid long render times because they were sharing the same computers as seven other MoPA teams on the same deadline.

In addition to winning over audiences, Hybrids has also helped the team members grow their professional networks and launch their careers. “The film was our graduation project, but we learned so much after that, taking it to festivals,” Brauch says. When the film became Oscars-eligible, their connections from MoPA and festivals helped the film become part of an animation showcase that was screened at major studios such as Disney, Framestore, MPC, DreamWorks, Blizzard, and more. In the end, Hybrids didn’t make the Oscars cut, but “it was a lot of fun because we learned from scratch how to promote a film,” he adds.

Today, each member of the team is employed in the industry. In Montreal, Pujol is doing effects at DNEG, and Brauch is an animator at Framestore. Thirion is in London working as a concept artist for Electric Theatre Collective. In Paris, Tailhades is working on environment and rendering for games at Unit Image, and Thireau is working on a feature animation film at Prima Linea Productions. “We learned that in the end, if you’re passionate about what you do, people will listen to you,” Brauch says.