Toronto-based designer, animator, and illustrator Oscar Mar recently made the decision to forgo client work to concentrate on Parallel, a new venture built to develop sci-fi IP including a trading card game of the same name.

Oscar Mar: “The biggest challenge in making this film (besides working while ill with COVID), was to create a one-minute piece of storytelling without characters other than one very simple drone – figuring out how the drone could convey emotions or have the audience understand what it was up to without any dialogue.

“Being that the drone has no face, arms, articulated body, or other features normally seen in characters, I tackled this by paying attention to its movements, the speed differences depending on what the drone was doing, and the way it looks around the environment.

“Balancing the amount of bounce and spring animations on every turn, start, and stop without falling into cartoon territory was the tricky part. The type of shots and their length was also taken into consideration.

“The second challenge was to get this done in seven days. It took one day to come up with the idea, design, and storyboard the shots. The rest of the days were used for production and rendering.”
 

 
Client: Parallel

Production: Oscar Mar Studio
Director/animator: Oscar Mar

Sound design: Cypher Audio