Blackmagic Cloud enabled a live action unit in Paris, a stop motion and live action team in Valence, and a VFX team in Annecy to work together for the hybrid stop motion and live action film Ordures.

A “slightly satirical animation about the nature of waste”, according to IMDb, Ordures tells the story of “a thrown away coffee cup that tries to make its way back to its owner, meeting other thrown away rubbish in cities and forests. It begins to question its true purpose in life.” The description confirms that the original title in French can be translated to… waste, rubbish, garbage. It’s a 48-minute environmental film directed by Foliascope and produced for broadcaster ARTE in collaboration with Darjeeling, Inthebox and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma, telling the story of Gobi, a disposable cup that also gets its nickname from French: gobelet.

The film (that you can watch on YouTube) is a stop motion and live action hybrid film that relied on DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic Cloud to streamline post production workflows and connect teams working across France. Using DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic Cloud, Foliascope coordinated a live action unit in Paris (Darjeeling), a stop motion and live action team in Valence, and a VFX team in Annecy (Inthebox). Together, they combined photorealistic live action with stop motion animation.

Nicolas Flory, Artistic and Technical Director at Foliascope, served as the film’s supervising editor. “Blackmagic Cloud was crucial to the production, especially for remote collaboration between the director and Foliascope. It also ensured we could share each production phase with the director, DP, colorist, VFX/compositing team and production team,” Flory explained.

“We made a deliberate choice to place Blackmagic Cloud at the center of the creative process for ‘Ordures,’ helping us organize and streamline production. Department heads could track progress daily, and it allowed us to collectively troubleshoot and make technical decisions across live action, animation and postproduction,” he continued.

Flory explained that one of the biggest challenges was delivering a photorealistic blend of live action and stop motion on a television series budget. This constraint required innovative solutions, including designing waterproofed puppet characters that could be animated in challenging real world environments, such as Parisian sewers and aquatic scenes.

Cloud collaboration in DaVinci Resolve Studio helped keep all aspects of the production on track. Live action scenes were shot first, and then edited and pregraded in DaVinci Resolve Studio. “While animation and editorial were happening at Foliascope, the director was still shooting and editing new live action material in Paris. We shared the evolving timeline with the colorist remotely to pregrade the live action base before importing it into Dragonframe for stop motion animation,” Flory explained.

Foliascope relied on DaVinci Resolve Studio and ShotGrid for technical and creative tracking, using Blackmagic Cloud’s Presentation mode for client review sessions and Fusion Studio for shot previsualization and clean up, removing rigs and green screens before final compositing. “We could easily render out and share a timeline or segment to share with anyone in the production team,” noted Flory. The environmental film has attracted support from organizations including Syctom, Alcome, Gestes Propres and Refashion. “Our goal was to make the trash feel truly alive while serving the story’s environmental message,” Flory noted.

“Blackmagic Cloud really powered the whole production,” he concluded. “By centralizing everything through the cloud, we could collaborate seamlessly and stay on budget and schedule. Honestly, without Blackmagic Cloud connecting everyone, a project like ‘Ordures,’ with teams spread across multiple cities, just wouldn’t have worked.”