Creation Museum
Breathing life into myth. Explore how Tenet, as leaders of the character team, designed and animated a vast menagerie of dinosaurs, dragons, and historical figures.
(YEAR)
2025
(TIMELINE)
5 Months
(SERVICES)
Character Animation
For the Creation Museum's ambitious 'Dragons and Dinosaurs' film, our task was to breathe life into a world where myth and history collide. As the specialists leading the character animation team, we were responsible for bringing every creature and person on screen to life, from the hero dinosaurs and dragons to the vibrant characters that populated their world.
This project required more than just animation; it required us to become masters of a mythical menagerie. The core challenges were:
Animating at Scale: To design, build, and animate a massive and diverse cast of characters, ensuring each one—from the lead dragon to the smallest background creature—felt unique and alive.
Grounding the Fantastical: How to create believable, emotionally resonant performances for creatures that never existed, grounding their movements in a sense of real-world physics and weight.
Seamless Integration: To ensure every character we created lived perfectly within the stunning worlds built by our partners, requiring a flawless technical and creative workflow between our specialized teams.
As the dedicated character leads, we brought a singular focus on performance, allowing our team to go deep on the craft of bringing creatures to life.
Dedicated Character Leadership: We took full ownership of the character pipeline. This specialized focus meant we could pour all our energy into the nuance of performance, from the initial model to the final animation, while our brilliant partners at Lightborne masterfully handled all environments and lighting.
A Flexible Performance Approach: We deployed a powerful hybrid animation system to capture the perfect performance for each unique creature. Motion capture provided a foundation of realistic, physical movement, while meticulous, frame-by-frame hand-keying was used to craft the more fantastical, story-driven moments that demanded an artist's specific touch.
A Collaborative Workflow: Our pipeline was built for partnership. We worked in lockstep with the team at Lightborne, ensuring that every character we delivered was technically sound and ready to be seamlessly integrated and lit within the beautiful environments they had built.
Our dedicated focus and flexible pipeline resulted in a film populated with a rich and believable cast of characters.
A Diverse and Lively World: The film features a massive cast of beautifully and believably animated creatures, successfully bringing the ambitious script to life.
A Showcase of Specialized Expertise: A powerful demonstration of our ability to lead a specific department, delivering high-volume, high-quality character animation within a large-scale production.
A Successful and Seamless Partnership: The project stands as a testament to our ability to integrate with other elite teams, working together to bring a massive, shared vision to the screen.
