Cosmo

Name: La Noria
Director: Carlos Baena
Genre: Animation
Released: 2018

Cinematics
Client work
2026
Globant Artworks

The story

A minute of cinematics. One month. Two animators. And characters that didn't have a face yet.

That's how Cosmos started. We needed a final cinematic that showed the tension between the hero and the final boss, one that made you feel how hard that fight was going to be. But we had no locked script, no facial rig built for cinematics, and a tight budget.

As the cinematics director, my first job was to give shape to an idea the game director wasn't even sure about yet. With no time for storyboard, we built the intention with references and a animatic that set the pacing and tone. From there, straight to production. 32 shots split between two animators, trusting each other's eye. Halfway through we brought in Ragdoll to handle cloth and physics without blowing up the timeline.

The result? A full minute of cinematics, in a month and a half. See how it turned out.

The finished cinematic

One minute, thirty-two shots, six weeks, two animators. This is what came out the other end. Everything below it is how.

What to look for

Everything below this point is grey. If you’re learning, that’s good news: there’s nowhere for the animation to hide. Watch for these four things and you’ll see most of the work.

Silhouette

With no textures and no lighting, the silhouette is all you have. If a pose reads in grey it will read rendered. If it doesn’t, no amount of lighting will save it.

Contact

Every point where a character touches the world: a hand on a surface, a foot on the ground, a body landing. Contacts are where weight becomes believable or falls apart.

Where the weight sits

Through the fall and the roll, follow the hips rather than the hands or the head. The hips carry the weight, and everything else is reacting to them.

The eyes, before anything else

On the face shots, watch where the eyes go just before an expression changes. The look happens first. That order is what makes a performance feel thought rather than posed.

The small things

From here on you’re looking at playblasts: grey, untextured, the counter still burned into the corner. No lighting, no materials, nothing to hide behind. This is the picture an animator actually works against, and it’s where a shot is won or lost. These two close-ups are doing story work: a hand reading the space around her, and the first moment the enemy’s power shows up in frame.

The hand, reading the space around her

The feet, where the enemy’s power starts to show

The action shot, and a five-minute fix

She falls and rolls. It’s the most physical shot in the sequence, and the one that nearly cost us days we didn’t have.

To get her into the roll, the body turns ninety degrees in Y. That single number is the whole problem: with Y sitting at ninety, the remaining axes stack on top of each other, and the Z rotation I needed for the roll stops behaving like a roll. The curves start fighting each other and the graph editor turns into something you can’t read, let alone tune.

The fix was a parenting trick. Two extra controllers on top of the hips: one carries the ninety-degree turn, the other carries Z on its own, so Z stays level with the body and a roll actually reads as a roll. Clean curves, nothing collapsing, and I could spend the time on timing instead of fighting the rig.

Five minutes of setup against five to eight hours of work. On a project with a month on the clock, knowing your tools isn’t a luxury. It’s the difference between delivering and not.

The faces, with one week left

We started this project with characters that had no face yet. The facial rig landed one week before delivery, which meant every performance beat in the sequence had to be found, animated and polished inside that week. These are the two that carry it: the main character, and the enemy she’s up against.

The main character

The main enemy