Goodbye Kepler

Goodbye Kepler

With thousands of planets discovered in a journey collecting data in deep space, the Kepler telescope arrives at a bittersweet end as it finally runs out of fuel in its ninth year. Moved by the news, 12-year-old Haley bids farewell in this celestial story.

Complete film.

Development

The idea came with a specific sensation in mind: a night in a calm summer, one with a nostalgic tint to it and the feeling of freedom reminescent of when you where a child. From that idea the feeling stayed, but the story we were about to tell contrasted with it greatly.

We played arround with the emotion of grief but felt through the lens of being a child, and how they might react to it. At first we were thinking of depicting the loss of a grantparent but then we decided it would make more sense to make it about a chilhood pet. 

We had the feeling, the idea we wanted to talk about and an aesthetic that came from all of or collective lived experiences from chillhood. From that point on it was all about writting an engaging jurney for the main character to go on.

Screenshots

Concept art

Haley

Haley is the typical kid that can’t sit still and is covered in bruises she doesn’t know how she got. Later we realized she definitely would be a nerd about dinosaurs, animals and space so we tried to incorporate those traits into her outfit mixing them with what we used to wear at that age.

Lur

For Lur we wanted a big, happy dog that loves playing and hasan extreme amount of patience. Lur and Haley have been bestfriends since Haley’s birth and Haley always tries to be matching with Lur so that means Lur gets similar accessories to the ones Haley wears. Lur’s collar is also decorated by Haley.

Lur means earth in Basque (Euskera). It a fairly common name for dogs in the Basque Country but we wanted to make the connection between space and the dog.

Background matte paintings

The artistic style was something we were very keen on. Since the very beginning we were sure we wanted to explore 3D stylization.

Inspired by this idea, we decided to develop our short film with a strong influence from painting and illustration. We adopted a very graphic approach, trying to stay as far away as possible from traditional rendering methods.

Even so, we wanted to take advantage of the fluidity of 3D animation. The combination of this fluidity with the visual and stylistic freedom that painting offers us seemed visually appealing.

House

For the interior scenes we were inspired by the farmhouses that exist all over Bizkaia called baserri. We came up with the idea that this house was the grandparents’ house but had been renovated and had a mixture of old and new things while maintaining that old house feeling. The room and kitchen are a perfect example of that.

Other locations

The veterinary is probably the biggest change in the short film. We go from the warmth of the house to a creepy hospital mood. We wanted the ambience to reflect that aseptic and lonely feeling hospitals usually have.

Thank you <3

It has been a gigantic challenge, specially for a team of four people. Not only when it comes to animation but lighting and matching the style of the backgrounds to the 3d characters. But as the end of the production came closer we started to see the results we were looking for. We are very proud of this project and we hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed doing it.