The Breadwinner

It was my great pleasure to work with Cartoon Saloon and Guru Studio on this powerful animated feature film as compositing lead.

Watch the trailer here!

I was involved in the compositing on "The Breadwinner" from the start of the project, helping build tools, templates and a new feature film pipeline based around Nuke at Guru Studio. As the project progressed I worked with the supervisors and directors to make sure we were hitting our goals both technically and artistically as well as handled training of new artists. There were a lot of unique challenges on this project but in the end I think we managed to overcome all of them thanks to great direction and a strong team.

Compositing Examples

Here is one example from the paper cutout based "Story World," which Parvana used to illustrate the history of Kabul as well as her own backstory throughout the movie. In this scene she's describing the long running tradition of invasions, as various historical figures ride through fire on horseback. I wanted this to feel a little scary and foreboding, since it tied into the rest of the films plot in a direct way, so I exaggerated the shadows and red light significantly being careful not to lose the faces.

In this scene Parvana has just ventured out into the streets of Kabul disguised as a boy for the first time to buy goods for her family. This shot, in my opinion represented a threshold being crossed, both physically and narratively for the main character, as she begins to realize first hand her how very different the lives of men are under Taliban rule. While the start of this sequence was cold and uninviting for this shot and the following I began to bring warmth back into the scene to help highlight that contrast and show that there are two worlds at play here.

At one point in the story, Parvana meets another girl in disguise and she takes her to see a candy factory. The candy in this location was meant to look like jewels so we went with a cooler pallet overall to help the warmer candy colours pop out. I also simulated candy dust and glimmering moats in NukeX to fill the air with a magical atmosphere.

I'm very proud of the work the comp team and I did. Please check out the film and novel if you can, we'd all appreciate it!

Special thanks to Sheldon Lisoy for being my mentor on this project.

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