NBC DATELINE
NBC Dateline was creating a story surrounding the life of Vanya from the book "The Boy From Baby House 10".. Vanya was an 18 year old boy who managed to survive living in a baby asylum in Russia where children with birth defects were left to die. With the help of nurses and their friends, Vanya was able to escape the baby asylum and be adopted by a family in Philadelphia. NBC's producer Dorothy Newell came up with the idea of letting Vanya direct animated reenactments of his memories of living in the baby asylum. During his last year of high school, Vanya did expressed to his mother that he wanted to be a film director and this could be an opportunity for him to have a directorial debut. Working with producer Dorothy Newell, our team was tasked with bringing Vanya's story to life. First the team had to design the characters. Those character sketches were used as a guide for modeling the characters in the 3D program Maya. All the animation, lighting and rendering was done in Maya as well. We compile all the rendered frames into after effects where we were able to add the final cartooning effects and color grading to achieve its style.