Martin, a mushroom, was born on the wrong rock. He overcomes enormous challenges to travel to a far away rock, where he hopes to find acceptance

This is a fantastic tale of the pure of heart overcoming bigotry. Anyone who’s experienced, sexism, racism, ageism, political or religious persecution will relate to this story. A character who’s passion is unlike the people who he grew up around. He discovers a place he can be himself, but faces enormous obstacles to get there. Along the way he exposes the futility of the other character’s bigotry and bias. He finally puts it all in perspective so that they can finally deal with the bigger issues in life.

‘The Wrong Rock’ was incredibly created by a team skimming 100 volunteers from all over the world. Directed and lead by Michael Cawood, a British animated filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. The film is stunningly gorgeous and wildly ambitious, packing in an incredible amount of emotions in unexpected places.

I have been making animated shorts for years. I started this one as I felt strongly about the topic of equality in society and I was looking for a simple metaphor to explore the it in animation. It started small and grew when I discovered just how many people were interested in helping me make it. The team ballooned to around 100 online, including the all female band, ‘The Mrs’ who wrote an all new song for the film.

I was also extremely lucky to attract the talented Grant Kirkhope to score the film, he’s famous for his work on dozens of the biggest game titles like Golden Eye, Banjo Kazooie, Mario + Rabbids, Viva Pinata and many more. The two of us both worked for Rare in the UK many years ago, creating games for Nintendo and Microsoft. Ultimately, we were looking to make a quality film with simple building blocks but sophisticated film-making.

Before we can save the world, we must put aside our differences. We’re all on the same Rock! – Michael Cawood

The film exceeded my wildest expectations, and it won Best Animated Short at the Burbank and Davis Film festivals. That’s actually my second win at the Burbank Film Festival as one of my previous films, ‘Devils Angels & Dating’ won the same award back in 2012.

Michael used the Artella Virtual Studio platform to attract talent and collaborate online, as the team was based all over the world. They added to that Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Mega, a Word Press website and Maya to animate. Most of the film was then rendered with consumer graphics cards bought on ebay, using a technique called GPU rendering in Redshift. This helped us produce quality results much faster than traditional CPU rendering. The film’s final edit was done in Premiere, with variety of other tools were used to help with effects and a very small amount of compositing.