Making the Breakout Star of Project Hail Mary

The New York Times explores the breakout star of Project Hail Mary, the faceless, five-legged, and surprisingly anxious Rocky.

Bringing a character like Rocky to life required a tight collaboration between on-set performance and CG animation. Our Senior Animation Supervisor, Arslan Elver, worked closely with puppeteer James Ortiz to ensure the practical energy captured on set translated perfectly into the final VFX. As Arslan explains to the NYT, when you’re working with a character without a face, "emotion comes through motion."

By developing a specialised visual language to convey Rocky’s emotion, our animation team proved that a character doesn’t need a face to carry the emotional weight of a film.

Read the full interview here.