The HalfRez leadership team approached us early this summer about creating this year's intro animation. We immediately accepted. They clued us in on the show's overall theme of “Mograph is Dead. Long live Mograph.” and we went from there. We felt that Half Rez is a great place to share your creative voice, as luck would have it the HalfRez logo has a speech bubble design. So, Associate Creative Director Brad Backofen had been experimenting with motion capture hand puppets in C4D and we felt like that was a great place to start for our intro. A puppet finding his creative voice. So we set out to write a few narratives that used puppets as the characters. Once we knew the show's theme and we settled on mocap puppets we crafted a story that allowed us to lean into our strengths. We’re quite comfortable with C4D and After Effects, but wanted to push ourselves into new areas. We decided to have the second act of our short story be a mixed media montage. Using AI generative backgrounds, VR painting, cell animation, and even real puppetry as we follow our hero puppet through the trip of a lifetime.