Following on the quirky charm of his 2023 short film Ripe, Noodle founder/CD Doug Alberts just dropped us his latest motion experiment called Origin, a snappy meditation on perspective and the boundary between 2D and 3D.

Doug Alberts: “Our creative hurdle in this project was discovering a bespoke style that didn’t feel too three-dimensional or two-dimensional, but danced between both. In our process, we originally explored frames that were solely 2D and solely 3D. But they lacked that special sauce that blended both.

“After many iterations, we eventually explored a frame in 3D and wondered what would happen if we began slanting the perspective on objects. This resulted in an optical illusion-like frame, where shapes that faced the orthographic camera looked 2D, but in a 3D space. That was the moment things clicked and we finally found what makes this film special.
 

“Our creative hurdle in this project was discovering a bespoke style that didn’t feel too three-dimensional or two-dimensional, but danced between both.”

 
“Our largest technical challenge was applying this slant technique to 3D scenes but maintaining the integrity of lighting and shadows. The beautiful thing about designing in 3D is perspective is always perfect but because we began slanting objects, perspective was no longer correct in-scene, especially the more we distorted objects.

“This threw off lighting, shadows, and pixel-perfect grid formations, but after setting up a variation of lighting techniques, we were able to allow/omit lights to hit certain objects. This let us art direct the scenes how we wanted them and solved this problem.”
 
 

 
Production: Noodle
CD: Doug Alberts
Creative Producer: Stef Alberts

Music/sound design: Sanctus