Animated and simulated in Blender, rendered in Cycles

Compositing done in Nuke

Kombucha is an 2025 feature film created by Jake Meyers. I worked on this project as a subcontractor for Third Beacon Studios from November 2024 to February 2025. I primarily worked on the effects for the "mother" creature, developing the rigging and simulation for the tentacles, match-moving the camera and any actors interacting with the creature, animating the creature itself, and compositing some of the final shots. I worked on 29 shots in total.

This project was a particular challenge for several reasons- first, the tentacle movement being partially simulated due to needing to collide realistically with actors and the set made it harder to predict how the final animation would look (although the simulation did save time when it came to realistic jiggle and follow-through). Additionally, the lighting and camera angles of many of the scenes featuring the creature made it difficult to do any accurate camera tracking, so many shots needed to be tracked manually. The same issue was present with creating collision and holdout geometry for the actors, as the inexact nature of the camera tracking as well as their interactions with water made it time-consuming to line up the geometry convincinly. The water itself also presented challenges, athough only one shot actually features a water simulation- the tentacles were often useful to hide intersections with the water's surface where the shortcuts used to simulate the appearance of the water would be the most obvious. The project overall also required the development of a more defined production pipeline than I have typically worked with, as rendering the shots was done on Third Beacon's computers due to the high resolution and subdivision levels used for the render version of the creature.