This new film for Freeview brings to life the thought that entertainment is even better when it’s free. It opens on a household cat, who can’t seem to take his eyes off a budgie, happily located in the corner of the room in her cage. All looks bad for the bird when the cat stalks his way across the sitting room, extends a paw and opens the cage door, but all isn’t necessarily as it seems…

The big challenge was to create the totally CG underwater environment. There was a requirement to create a huge number of complex plants and vegetation with the maximum amount of flexibility for the directors. Conventional modelling would have created huge issues of memory usage and interaction speed as well as being more inflexible and rigid. Our solution was to generate the plants themselves procedurally using in-house software as well as the distribution of them. All this was particle based, the distribution of the particle/plants being controlled by easily painted pictures applied to the pond floor. The plants themselves used “extrusions” of the particles and branching technology based on procedural rules. Complicated to set up but allowed non technical artists to create complex worlds with ease.

Softimage was used to create these landscapes and Arnold radiosity renderer to create the photorealistic look.

The water surface rippled based on the location of lily pads. This was a procedural generated ripple that could be recreated as layout changes demanded.

For lighting/rendering we rendered layers which gave the compositors flexibility. Various depth layers were created as well as animated caustic light rays to add magic. Floating particles were generated to aid the feeling of depth.

The tadpoles were more conventional. A lot of work went into their translucency which necessitated the building of internal organs. The tadpoles had to be anatomically correct and rigged to move naturally. It was important to get across character in the animation.