3D Artist Bree O’Donnell is making magic real

In a style that feels nostalgic and nascent, Bree O’Donnell is crafting her singular vision of a 3D witch named Mary. Through the tiny window of short clips on Instagram and TikTok, Mary’s world seems enchanting and vast. Bree’s work exudes melancholic emotion and ethereal femininity, painting the surfaces of Mary’s world in the vibrating style of stop-motion animation, dappled with sparkling light and computer-generated surfaces so convincing it feels like you could pose the model with your own hands.

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O’Donnell sat down with us to talk a bit about her process creating textures and her life’s work making magic real.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background, how you got into art, and where you learned to animate?

My name is Bree, and I’m an animator, filmmaker. And really, background starts pretty early, when I was a little kid, making a million little stories on paper and taping them together and making little books. Running around in the woods, obsessed with the idea of fantasy and magic. A need for magic to be real, which led me to just continue drawing.

And then as I got older, starting to animate. Animation was really a window to fantasy and magic and worldbuilding in a way that’s very accessible. So I refused to let go of that fantasy and refused to let go of everything I ever wanted coming true. And I think that just naturally led me to continue developing an animation craft that has been informed by whatever tools I’ve had available to me at different stages in my life or working at different companies or at different jobs.

They would have different computer programs and I would adapt from drawing to maybe doing cel animation and then taking cel animation, getting into computer animation. So that’s kind of my little background. In a simpler way, cel animator-turned-computer animator, but obsessed with that stop-motion world.

Your work feels so nostalgic to me, so texturally similar to Rankin and Bass movies.

Whoa, Rankin and Bass. You know, no one has ever brought that reference back to me. There’s something that’s, like, sizzling and alive there and really textural and really nice.

I’ve always been turned off by a traditional approach to computer animation, which is typically informed by asking, how do we make this as real as possible? Texturally and emotionally, what’s always attracted me about sculpting in 3D with a computer … [was] the ability to hold something, almost. There’s something inherently nostalgic and safe and comforting about stop motion in general, or even vintage or nostalgic movies and TV. We just feel safe with it.

I was attracted to the sense of nostalgia and magic that just lives in, for me, in a lot of stop motion. So when I was working with a computer and learning these programs and learning how to sculpt, I was definitely in that world mentally of stop motion. But I think even more so, there was something so exciting about the way that surfaces can sparkle in a digital environment.

And I’ve always loved this melancholy sweetness of walking down the street in Brooklyn, for example, and it just rained and the ground is sparkling and wet. And it’s dark and melancholy and it’s so sweet and it’s so alive. And I found that similar feeling in a lot of textures I was working with in 3D.

And luckily, they’re easy to make too. I could start making everything sparkly and alive. I think there’s a visual aesthetic, but [also] emotional tether that demanded that direction with the look and the feel.

It’s funny that you say it’s easy to model textures because I’m learning Blender and I’m having the hardest time.

If you were to get trained in 3D, you would learn how to do all that stuff super well. I took a class once and I didn’t really do well.

I didn’t like it. I just skip over all the hard stuff. There’s a limitation in working with 3D, especially if you’re not someone that’s interested in spending two months getting into the math and the geometry. I’ve never been interested in that. I found you don’t really need to be. I work in Cinema 4D, which is very similar to Blender. You could use either.

I just click around on the default settings of texture application. And I like to cycle between cubic and projection and spherical. I just wait for something to look right. Working more stylized, you don’t really need to get into all that.

I think there’s a proper way to work in animation. And that proper way requires typically 10 different departments of big teams of people all working on stuff. As an expressive independent artist, I get a lot of kids that message me and they want to learn 3D.

It’s so overwhelming because it’s [the] kind of … industry that is built with a lot of team members, people who specialize in different skills.

I think if you have something that you’re wanting to express or make and you have a program like Cinema 4D, you just keep molding it and playing [with] it and you find your own way through. And that just creates a much more special result.

I would not survive if I got hired to do animation on a movie that was doing 3D animation.

Geometry nodes are killing me.

I love the idea of someone being really into the math of it. I would love to meet her. I bet she makes some cool stuff. I got into art because I was like, I’ll never have to do math again.

It’s kind of like painting. If you were to learn painting, you’d probably have to go study 15th, 16th-century modern and postmodern techniques, acrylics, oils. And if you just follow that way to do it, yeah, you’re painting, but like, so is everyone else. What are you really doing? But, if you let your spirit guide you somewhere else, who knows what you’ll end up doing.

The music choices you make seem really intentional in the snippets you post. It seems like it’s very much part of the process for you, and not an afterthought.

I’ve tried to plan an animation and animate it, and then I’ll look for the right song and edit it. It gets so forced and it doesn’t feel right.

I just want to see my character Mary waiting at the bus, just listening to music while I’m working. I constantly listen to new music and save it to a playlist. A lot of people have been asking me for my playlist, which I do want to release at some point. But every song I’m responding to gets put into a playlist based on film ideas I have. So there’s a “Witch from Portsmith” playlist that I just am constantly filling with everything that’s really hitting for me and hitting that same black sparkly pavement feeling.

So that music is bringing me there. I have a fairy one, I have a sci-fi one. I have a New York City one. A million little playlists. And then when I want to work on an animation, I’ll go through my playlist.

I’ll see if anything’s hitting that idea or sketch I have of an animation. And then I like to animate to the sound. Like collaborating with the artist, even though they’re not involved.

Then I’m in conversation with it. And we’re trying to hold onto that as we’re getting into production on our miniseries and starting to work with voice talent and our actresses and other collaborators. I really want to maintain that dance between a sound artist who is using their voice and expression and allowing room for them to really bring something that I can respond to rather than blocking out a scene to the nth degree.

We really try to allow there to be some improv, but it’s more about allowing things to come up and embracing it and working with it.

Tell me more about your new series.

We’re working on a little miniseries. Mary and everything that we’ve been working on has lived on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. So I think it’s important to us … to keep it there.

We’ve developed a really sweet community of mostly girls. So the next evolution of the project, it definitely makes sense to keep it online for now, right where everyone can access it, you know?

It sounds like you’re not only animating all of this, but directing as well.

Yeah, I currently am doing basically everything. I’m writing it. I will be directing it. I’m animating everything right now, designing all the parts of it, which can be a lot. If it’s ever too much, then I step back and I re-approach the work by evaluating what am I trying to say and how can I do this in a way that feels easy, that feels true and evocative.

So yeah, currently wearing every single hat, except for my creative partner, Cath Daly, who’s my producer, who has taught me what a producer really is. They are the foundational protection around the project that is constantly requiring the work to stay true to itself. They’ve been such a necessary and important part of the creative development of the series.

I think as we go along, we’re still in pre-production. As we get along into production, we’re going to continue looking for opportunities to collaborate with artists, but coming from the place of a true creative relationship rather than trying to book artists to do animation or X, Y, or Z, you know?

I also really, really want to get into live action. I could just totally see the world translating over to a live-action universe, in a really exciting way. That’s definitely something I’m super curious about.

Have you ever made a live-action film?

Well, I actually have experimented a lot with live action, but predominantly doing music videos for my own musical projects … throughout the years.

I’ve always made music. It’s not something I release or promote, but it’s just part of my expressive practice. So I’ve had a few, you know, little videos I’ve made through the years.

They’re developed in a very similar way to my animation. Typically I’m shooting myself on a green screen or a white screen or just a seamless backdrop. Then I bring it into After Effects and expand out the emotional universe of it with whatever I have, usually blocks of color that I’ll mask out and then blur and add some grain. So I would love to continue developing that.

I wish I had five of me. I get so overwhelmed because I have so many things I want to make. But I think that will just take time.

Is there any part of your process that involves using AI?

Actually, no, we haven’t really used any AI. I was actually thinking about AI this morning, and I was wondering why we don’t use AI. Obviously, there’s moral and environmental parts to it. But AI is all about having no limitations. You can do anything, you can make anything. And I think my work and my relationship to fantasy has always been about having limitations. Even just from being a kid and wanting more out of my life — something different.

That was a limitation and demanded fantasy out of the way I was processing the world around me. And in my creative practice now, I still work that way. I have limitations with my computer that doesn’t even have good RAM or a CPU.

When I get error messages, I reduce the file sizes. I reduce how I’m working. I make it lighter.

I’m embracing the limitation. And the fantasy that comes out of that is so beautiful to me. So I’m not currently having any chemistry with AI or interest in it.

I know it’s a hot topic in the industry and I’m not in that conversation right now. But we’ll see if that ever changes, you know.

I work in post-production as well. I do creative direction and stuff. With the work we have online, we’ve talked to some different studios about potentially collaborating and getting production support on the series. These tech bros who are higher-ups in these different agency companies that are working in film, so excited about AI. When I talk to them, they’re just so focused on the tool. It’s just boring to me.

People are not responding to my work online because it’s made with a computer. They’re responding to it because I’m exploring a very specific relationship to femininity. And all the girls that are online know it well and there’s something beautiful there.

Being really into tools is also cool. I really want to find those people that I can work with because I’m never going to be that person. So, yeah, no shade against the baddies in STEM. We love the baddies in STEM.

Is there anything that you want to make a note of?

There is more Mary coming. We’re working on it every day.

I wake up and I think about it and my producer thinks about it every night before they go to sleep. We’re working on it and it’s going to be so amazing and beautiful.