This is a 3D animated short I made for Zack D. Films in 2024.

It was created using Blender 4.2 and rendered using the Cycles engine.

A message was fixed to pigeon’s leg and it took off flying urgently to deliver it in 1943 during World War II.

Earlier that day,. American soldiers were getting ready to bomb a town in Italy overtaken by enemies. But the enemy troops had already retreated because a group of allied British soldiers had entered the town ahead of schedule. And if the bombs were dropped, they would hit the British troops on their side.

The radios weren’t working so they couldn’t be warned to stop. So a trained messenger pigeon, known as G.I. Joe, was their only option. He managed to cover 20 miles in just 20 minutes and made it just in time to stop the bombing.

G.I. Joe saved over a hundred British soldiers and many civilians, and was given a special medal for his bravery.

I created this short using a variety of tools, including the Human Generator add-on for Blender. I also used professionally captured Motion Capture data from Adobe’s Mixamo website, and a variety of assets from pages like Turbo Squid, CG Trader, and Sketchfab. In addition, I used Move.ai to convert videos of myself acting into mocap data.

The client requested I create this as accurately as I could with period accurate costumes and weapons. I used historically accurate maps, locations, uniforms, and aircraft for that region during those years, even down to the identification number for the pigeon printed on his messenger capsule.

Not all items could be found online, so I needed to build several props from scratch using reference photos, including the Wireless 18 radio used by the British troops.