ISAURA is an action packed animated series for all ages based in Mozambique. The epic tale has strong conservation undertones, delivered with breathe taking visuals, interesting characters and beautiful locations.
Workflow:
Lucan is an animation studio founded through play and innovation. Personal projects give us the perfect opportunity to explore, discover, fail and succeed - at trying new things.
With ISAURA we wanted to integrate Unreal Engine as a real-time solution to our hybrid 2D/3D pipeline. We are thrilled with the results and were awarded a MegaGrant by Epic Games for our efforts.
ISAURA uses a mix of traditional, rigged and simulated character animation. The backgrounds all started as digital paintings that were then mapped onto 3D geometry. This geo was then spaced out and warped to give a sense of depth and volume. The camera’s were animated in 3D, where we used tracked camera data to give nuance to otherwise stiff, mechanical shots.
Finally the characters and backgrounds all came together in Unreal and Nuke for finishing.
Process:
Before putting pen to paper we spent two weeks in various parts of Mozambique taking thousands of reference photographs in an effort to be as authentic to ISAURA's homeland as possible.
We traveled North from the capital of Maputo to Quelimane and Pebane. There we overlanded to remote areas, to capture every detail and texture of the coastal fishing villages and people.
This reference was used in briefing - from backgrounds to characters - in order to achieve the look we had in mind.
