E.D. Films

E.D. Films is an artist-driven animation studio based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal, creating illustrated animation for film, VR and XR experiences, video games, installations and domes. Alongside its productions, the studio develops its own animation tools, several of them with support from the Canada Media Fund.

I worked at E.D. Films as a Technical Artist from September 2022 to August 2023, on the experimental motion capture project Puppet Tool and on the studio's PSD to 3D tools.

Puppet Tool was an experimental project that explored puppetry as an interface for desktop motion capture. Conventional motion capture relies on expensive suits and large teams; Puppet Tool instead used affordable devices such as VR headsets and controllers, letting animators perform characters like puppets and build up their animation in layered passes, much as they would edit audio or video.

The team developed a prototype in Unity that ran on mobile VR headsets and supported recording, scrubbing and overdubbing performances. The project was funded by the Canada Media Fund and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada through CDRIN.

PSD to 3D is a suite of tools that turns layered Photoshop files into textured 3D meshes, so that 2D artists can bring their illustrations into 3D software without modelling them by hand. PSD to FBX exports the generated meshes as FBX files for Blender, Unity, Unreal Engine and other 3D software, and PSD to Unreal imports Photoshop projects directly into Unreal Engine 5 as textured, sculptable geometry.