Cloudboy

Overview

Cloudboy (2026) is a short animated graduation film from the Netherlands Film Academy, created in just 6 months of VFX time. Despite having a hippogriff and a small dragon, the insecure Cloudboy (19) has no control over his flock of sheep-clouds, as he doesn't dare do anything without his Cloudboy Handbook. When a massive storm hits and he loses his book, he is faced with a choice: flee to safety and abandon his team, or learn to trust himself.

As CG lead I oversaw and supervised a 35-person team across the production. My focus was primarily on FX, helping shape the look and behavior of effects throughout the film. Cloudboy wears a full outfit, and every piece of clothing needed to move believably through wind and weather across 45 shots - for this we built a CFX system in Houdini using Vellum, with per-shot artist controls for wind, stiffness and collisions so the workflow stayed fast enough to run across the whole team. The dragon's wing membranes were simulated to genuinely catch wind as he flies through the storm, and the hippogriff's feather simulation used masked proxy setups so artists could blend between simulated and animated feathers without rerunning sims.

The film runs on a custom USD pipeline connected to ShotGrid, built so every artist could work on their own task within the same shot and always see the latest version of every layer without overwriting each other's work - essential with the amount of effects and animation layers involved. Beyond the technical side, I served as a communication link between the director and the CG team, translating creative direction into actionable tasks and supervising the overall CG process to bring the film together on schedule.