Skycar Recent News

Curious about the magical powers of composting? Wondering how you can help fight climate change? Of course you are! We partnered with Recology to bring to life this fateful journey of an apple core. You’ll never look at your food scraps the same again.

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2022 was a tour-de-force of a year moving out of the chaos of the early 20’s and into new realms and new promise. Our year found us animating fantastical landscapes for Adobe Stock in a 3 spot series, shooting in Istanbul and other far flung places for Stellar, making a comedy series and brand film for HPE and editorial on beautiful films about Alaska Native Art for Fine Arts Museums of SF. Oh and a giant whiteboard called Vibe kept us really busy too! It was a wonderful year of expansion including new team members and new clients. We feel incredibly fortunate to do this work and are beyond grateful to those who trust us with their projects and those we trust to make it happen with us. Here’s to 2023 – another year to have fun making cool stuff!

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We teamed up with the crew at Stellar to help launch their new partnership with Moneygram International. With the MoneyGram and Stellar partnership, digital wallet holders can now buy and withdraw USDC in cash at MoneyGram locations around the world. We shot locally in Oakland, CA and not so locally in Bali, Indonesia to bring this story to life.

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It wasn’t originally conceived as so, but each of the HPE Comedy films were so well received that we got an order for another one. For episode 3 we had to set up a huge problem; our writer Joe Morgan conceived a chance to visit the world of 1940 Noir to help illustrate the problem. The talented cast had no problem stepping back in time, and we even got a new cast member to play Rex, a fantastic addition to the team. We loved creating this whole series, who knows, maybe there’s an episode 4?

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Itʻs that time of year, we love the holidays, right? We love it until we find ourselves in the garage lost in the boxes of January disregard. But we must get these lights on the house, we must persevere. Luckily for Mateo he has some unexpected help.

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We recently wrapped up a months long collaboration with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to lead post-production on a 5-part documentary series on Alaska Native Art. We steeped ourselves in the raw footage, the sounds, the scenery and the history of Alaska native people, in order to create 5 films that truly honor this rich cultural history. It features the contributions of artists and cultural practitioners from across Alaska. We are grateful for each person’s participation and guidance: Qaĝaalakux̂, Quyana, Gunalchéesh, Haw’aa, Quyanaq, Thank you. To view the complete film series and online story, please visit: FAMSF.org

During Adobe MAX 2022 week, we wanted to share a collab we did with the crew at Adobe Stock. They invited us to create three animated “fantastic voyages” using only stock assets (video, images, illustrations, textures, and 3D) from their vast libraries. Each journey took our team to unexpected and inspired places – see where they take you!

The HPE GreenLake team was looking for a story that encompassed the power of their platform including speed, agility and ease of use. We created a go-fast story with characters who we love, who love the product and who could say it all in two minutes. They did it!

The Vibe S1 smartboard is as awesome as it seems; it slices, it dices, it does your homework. We loved making this film with the @the.vibe.board team, they are as kind as the board is cool, and the process was a blast – especially with the amazing cast we got to play with.

In the fourth installment of our Case Study series with Stellar we stuck close to home to feature the ascendant team at Wyre. We shot right here in San Francisco and it was great to get out from behind the Zoom windows to all collaborate in person. Check out the clip to learn how Wyre, a crypto infrastructure provider with a full suite of APIs, empowers worldwide businesses to easily and safely build on Stellar with USDC.

Earth Day began in 1970, but 52 years later it’s become less of a nice concept and more of a powerful reminder: it’s time to genuinely orient around the earth and the important facts about climate change, not just talk about it. Last summer, we began making a series of short films for Meta in which we profiled three inspiring stories of people fighting climate change. The series took us all over the map, starting with a remote shoot in Bali, followed by a visit to the east coast to shoot in Maine, and ending with an overseas trip to Jamaica. In each case were were amazed by the women we met and the profound difference each of them is making. We loved making these little films and hope that others get to see these incredible women for their kind hearts and courageous actions. On Earth Day, Meta put Mikaela’s video front and center. Watch the full series below.

We had a chance to team up with the same amazing cast from our recent comedic effort for HPE’s GreenLake announcements today. Part 2 of the “Where’s Oscar Series” shows how our heroes handle all of the requests coming at them…but thankfully their lives are about to get a LOT easier!

Happy Valentine’s Day! It’s a good day to celebrate love! :two_hearts: Our film Little Point Richmond is about the love our neighbor Jimmie Robinson shares by hand crafting exquisite tiny fairy houses for his community. We hadn’t shared the full film yet as it was on a festival run, but that is complete and so here you go. If inspired, please share the neighborly love!

Adobe approached us to help launch their new product Adobe Express in style. Adobe Express is the new way to make killer content quickly from thousands of beautiful templates. Jump on in to the fun!

As the Luminar team has said to us, “Watching our proactive safety in action is kinda boring…because it just looks like a car stopping right on time, every time.” But, if you stretch and stop that time to show exactly what is happening within MILLISECONDS, without any human interaction, then it’s a whole different story. We built two distinct 3D worlds to show key auto safety scenarios: one in the suburbs at 25mph and another on a freeway at 65mph. It turns out, there’s a lot of intelligent technology that kicks in “under the hood” of a Luminar enabled vehicle that allows it to avoid unexpected and dangerous driving situations. Through Bhakti Patel’s twilight aesthetic, we also emphasize that, unlike camera based proactive systems (hello, Tesla), Lidar works day and night, rain or shine.

One of the tricks for this project was to build a reliable stereoscopic process that works with a 3D renderer that would provide fast previews and give us the stylized (yet somewhat photoreal) look that we were going for. For this, we chose Redshift but, unlike the standard renderer in Cinema 4D, Redshift does not have a built in stereoscopic setup. So, our animators custom designed a two-camera rig (using Xpresso) that could be hand-animated with total control over the areas of convergence and zero parallax.

For example, here are some process shots from Devin Earthman’s rig.