Kena: Bridge of Spirits

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

Cinematics
Client work
2021
Ember Lab

The story

I started doing cycles. "Help us with this one, and with this one, and this other one." Three years later I was leading cinematics.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits was one of the longest and most important projects of my career. Little by little they handed me more responsibility, until it was clear that cinematics were my strength. The big scenes, full of emotion, where you had to make people feel something real. That's where I felt at home.

Over time I moved up to lead the cinematics team and animated between 15 and 20 minutes, a lot for this level of detail. Along the way I built libraries of breathing, mouths and phonemes that gave the pipeline more agility without giving up quality.

It was demanding, one of those projects that push you to your limit and teach you as much about the craft as about yourself. I came out different from how I went in. Today it's something I'm really proud of, and I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.

The film

Kena: Bridge of Spirits, made at Ember Lab. Start with the trailer so you know what it looks like finished. Everything after this is the work underneath it, roughly in the order I grew into it.

What to look for

Most of what follows is playblast: grey, unlit, the slate still burned into the frame. If you’re learning, that’s the useful version. Four things worth watching for.

Contacts

Every point where she meets the world. A hand on rock, a foot on ground, a rope inside a fist. Weight lives in the contacts, and grey footage has nowhere to hide them.

Correct, but silent

Watch for the gap between a move that works and a move that tells you something. Both look fine on their own. Only one of them is acting.

Hands can act

On the hand shot, cover the rest of the frame in your head. Everything you understand about that moment is arriving through two hands and nothing else.

What survives the grey

Where a playblast sits next to its render, compare them. Almost nothing about the performance changes. That’s the point: it was finished long before it was ever lit.

The body first

Before anything else you have to make a body behave. I put this shot here because it’s the kind of thing an animator can pick apart for a while: contacts, weight and overlap all carrying at the same time. Then a rope, playblast and render side by side, so you can see how much of the finished image was already decided in the grey one.

Playblast

Rendered

When mechanics start to act

Same physicality, except now the body has to say something about who she is. This is where mechanics stop being an exercise and start being a character, and it’s the step most people skip. A move can be technically right and still tell you nothing.

Acting with nothing but hands

No face, no dialogue, no body to lean on. Two hands, and everything the moment needs has to come through them. This is the one I’d put in front of a student: you don’t need a face to carry emotion, or to show what a character is thinking. Playblast on one side, render on the other.

Playblast

Rendered

When the facial rig arrived

The first thing you do with a new facial rig is find out what it can’t do. These are tests we ran when the rig landed: whether it could hold an expression, whether it could carry an emotion, whether it survived a close-up. What we learned here fed the breathing, mouth and phoneme libraries the rest of the team animated from.