After nearly a decade in development, E.D. Films’ ambitious, experimental animated short film Return to Hairy Hill (a.k.a. Retour à Hairy Hill) will make its debut this week at Montreal’s Sommets du cinéma d’animation (Animation Film Summit). Featuring several first-of-their-kind techniques — including the studio’s proprietary 2D to 3D pipeline — the short will be featured in the official competition alongside the best Canadian animated films, screening at the Cinémathèque Québécoise from May 9-14.
Written and directed by E.D. Films co-founder Daniel Gies (Giant Bear), Return to Hairy Hill utilizes several experimental techniques developed in-house by the multidisciplinary studio, beginning with its industry-leading PSD to 3D plugin that converts 2D Photoshop drawings into stylized 3D content. The film also relied on a new VR puppet system, a new animation export tool for game engines and more. Those tools were combined with hand-drawn ink illustrations, digital paintings, paper puppet models, hand-drawn animation, traditional keyframe animation and more. The result leverages CG tools to create a stop-motion impression in the character performances.
“When we originally started planning out Return to Hairy Hill more than 10 years ago, we intended to make a film that was essentially 2.5D puppet animation, but we found that the format wasn’t able to convey the level of emotion we wanted,” said Gies. “We decided to utilize a more traditional 3D approach. Being a small team with very little 3D production experience, we knew that if we were going to utilize our strengths as 2D storytellers we would need to develop new tools and techniques to pull off such an ambitious project. The effort was very much worth it, and our small team was able to create a new type of 3D world that has a unique beauty and feel.”
Return to Hairy Hill is loosely based on a tragic, true family story passed down by Gies’ grandmother. Growing up in an isolated region of Canada known as “Hairy Hill,” she and her siblings were abandoned by their parents at a young age. Determined to keep the family together, she attempted to care for the others, but eventually local authorities discovered their plight. Before the children were split up, to be placed with other families in distant towns, his grandmother promised her siblings that she would find a way to reunite the family. Sadly, the circumstances of her life had other plans and they would never all be together again.
Gies was determined to capture the emotional essence of that story, highlighting a profound sense of loss and isolation while holding onto a glimmer of hope and eventual acceptance.
To find the right balance between aesthetic and emotion, the team began experimenting in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Using UE’s pre-visualization and real-time rendering tools, E.D. Films — one of the first animation studios to receive an Epic MegaGrant — was able to define the look of the project. The film’s fabrication needs also led to the creation of Scene Track by E.D. Films, an open source tool that allows users to record and export animation data within game engines. From there, the team pivoted to Autodesk’s Maya, where they could import hand-drawn illustrations to create the background environments and try out different camera angles.
Gies also experimented with several looks for the characters, creating both physical paper puppets and CG counterparts for each iteration. For the siblings, he elected to remove the faces entirely — referencing both indigenous doll-making practices in the area, and the fact that the protagonist can no longer recollect what they look like. Instead, she remembers their personalities, which are reflected by animalistic touches like the timidness of the youngest sister embodied by a rabbit, the independence of the brother translated as a fox and the cautious trepidation of another sister, presented as a deer. The design of the bird-like mother was meant to show that she was a creature trapped between two worlds.
With memory playing a major role in the film, Gies and the team at Montreal’s Audio Coara decided to use tape machines and old tape recordings to convey the feeling of a memory degrading over time. Sound designer Tyler Fitzmaurice traveled to six different remote cabins and recorded the sounds of nature, including animals in the wild, water flowing, trees creaking in the wind … The audio team then experimented with several types of physical paper to capture the sounds of sheets bending, which gave the animated puppets a unique noise.
The final theatrical cut of Return to Hairy Hill will make its debut at the Sommets du cinéma d’animation in Montreal. Founded in 2002 to celebrate animation cinema in all formats, the festival launched an international competition in 2011 to award the best animated projects around the world. In 2022, it shifted focus to honor the growing community of animation filmmakers located in Canada.
Following completion of the project, E.D. Films created a tutorial for artists on how to use the studio’s PSD to 3D plugin, which can be accessed for free here.
