E.T. 40th Anniversary Animation

Initially, we were approached with a mystery project concerning a children’s book. The great team over at Ted Perez + Associates had seen our past work with the Edmonton Oilers and decided that we would be the perfect partners to bring this mystery project to life. As the kickoff got closer, we were brought into the loop and learned that we were going to help promote the 40th anniversary of E.T. by animating the beautiful illustrated children’s novel illustrated by Kim Smith. Being a film that we absolutely love, our team was excited to add our small contribution to this wonderful story.

Being how impressive the source material is both in the story and the illustration, we were able to focus solely on the fun part - breathing life into the pages of the book. Our team worked with the flattened artwork, meticulously cutting, re-painting, and separating the characters and elements and preparing them for animation. We built a procedural system in Houdini to take the newly layered PSD files and automatically build 3D meshes, UV the meshes, and apply the textures. With six minutes of animation to tackle, automating the setup of all of the scenes enabled us to spend as much of the timeline as possible focusing on the movement and communicating emotion through the characters.

One of the challenges of this animation was how to keep the animation fresh and interesting for six minutes while working with constrained character and camera movements. Moving in between full screen and the forest environment allowed us to keep it from feeling to repetitive. We also incorporated additional elements in the foreground and background to increase depth and parallax. Finally, we used transitional elements to provide unique cut points in addition to the page turns and traditional edits.

Below, you can find selected stills from the animation. It was a pleasure to work with the artwork by Kim Smith, providing a unique twist to our usual style. We also appreciate the team over at Ted Perez + Associates for allowing us the leniency to bring our own unique style and twist to this established story. We can’t believe it has already been 40 years since E.T. premiered, but we are honored to have been a part of bringing it to life.