Learn How SpongeBob SquarePants "Go Fetch" Episode Was Created

Introduction 

Adam Paloian (CEO of Pinreel Inc.): My name is Adam Paloian, I am the writer and director of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode “Go Fetch!” which was made with my production company, Pinreel Inc.

My first venture into CG was Pinreel’s debut project, a 2023 music video for Tenacious D’s “Video Games,” produced by Jack Black himself. At the time, I was developing a CG-animated series and saw the project as the perfect opportunity to start building my team and production pipeline from the ground up.

Even though I don’t personally work in CG software, I was able to communicate with my team by directing through the lens of 2D fundamentals such as design, art direction, layout, and character posing. This process opened a new path in my career, allowing me to merge the classic 2D principles I’d learned from some of the best artists and directors in the industry with a group of highly skilled and adaptable CG generalists. It made me fall in love with the medium and the creative control it offers, opening new doors for me as an artist.

I had always considered myself a 2D purist, but that changed once I began collaborating with young, ambitious CG artists and seasoned innovators who were curious, passionate, and eager to experiment. Through Pinreel, I’ve built a studio that’s flexible by design by allowing artists to work in their own way while encouraging experimentation across softwares. Rather than using mixed techniques as a visual gimmick, I aim to curate each approach into a cohesive, purposeful vision that shows off what everyone on the team is great at.

Go Fetch

Adam: I started this project by continuing my goal with Pinreel from where I left off on the Tenacious D music video, which was to create a tactile world that bridges 2D design, the handmade texture of stop-motion, the stylized composition and lighting of matte paintings, and the in-camera depth and tangibility of CG. I was especially inspired by the optical illusions found in vintage View-Master dioramas and Max Fleischer’s stereoptical sets from the 1930s. Those early techniques became key reference points for how I would direct each artist who joined the project.

SpongeBob was the perfect testing ground for this approach. It was my first professional job, and I knew the showrunners would support Pinreel’s creative experimentation in a way few studios might with such a major IP. When I pitched the concept to Marc Ceccarelli, he was immediately excited to explore how we could reimagine SpongeBob in CG through an entirely new visual lens.

My goal was to honor the show in a way that felt official, not like a fan-made experiment or quirky art project. I wanted to preserve everything that made the original series great – its simple storytelling, cartoony animation, and marine-inspired world – while pushing it into new territory: a tactile, dimensional environment built from 2D design principles and innovative CG techniques.

I set the story in the darkness of the Mariana Trench to make the character animation pop against a moody, cinematic backdrop. Visually, I drew influence from Stephen Hillenburg’s background in marine biology, channeling his fascination with real underwater life while giving it a stylized, storybook quality that felt both nostalgic and new.

This project was a huge undertaking, and due to our limitations, it required extensive pre-planning on my part. I created an art direction bible that outlined my approach to set assembly, character surfacing, color keys, and animation design-to-camera, which went into the initial visual development. It served as a blueprint for how I wanted the film to look and feel, and it became the foundation for onboarding, testing, and guiding each artist who joined the production, all while I was simultaneously running the studio and supervising the creative process.

Lip Comarella and Jules Itzkoff (Art Directors): Everything began with the CG layouts and the beautiful animation that we started with from the Alembic imports. To match the innovation in the animation and rigging, we wanted the art direction to have its own distinct look that could feel unique but in the same way never be too loud, too complex, never risk overpowering the character-focused framing and animation.

We wanted to maintain a subtle but clear nod to the very first original SpongeBob sets, painted with lots of grit and love for every brushwork. Something 3D often ignores, leaving out of the equation the human dimension of every piece of art.

A mixed media approach where 3D and 2D elements blend together, leaving the viewer wondering what exactly they’re looking at.

Especially for a short, we wanted every one of the 80+ shots to feel massaged and set-dressed with great care – beautifully arranged little vistas, a tribute to the View-Master images and toy dioramas that make you want to reach out and touch them.

We went straight into Blender for concept art, which changed everything. Instead of painting something and handing it off, every concept environment was also the actual 3D set – ready for lighting, animation, and final rendering. That workflow gave the piece its specific look: painterly, tactile, slightly imperfect in a way that feels alive.

Jordi Campher (Lighting Artist): We were trying to go for a look that captured the feel of old three-dimensional dioramas, making use of tangible textures and a tilt-shift effect using shallow depth-of-field where we could. In addition to this, we made use of lighting methods that made the models and environments look practical and tangible. As if it were being lit in a studio or in a stop-motion workspace, rather than a typical CG environment.

We had an abundance of references to work with. Adam had mood boards full of reference images. Some pulled inspiration from View-Master dioramas and stop-motion environments for the general look of the short, while others were used for how the textures should look, how the lighting should look, which colour palettes we were going to use, etc.

The goal was to "paint" with the lighting, as Adam described it, which we achieved with a typical three-point lighting setup: key lights, fill lights, and rim lights, and added what we needed from there to accentuate the characters' expressions, the mood of the scene, to highlight key parts of the models, etc. We were inspired to do this because we wanted each and every frame to look as if it could hold up on its own as a separate art piece.

Another thing that inspired the way we did the lighting was the use of gradients. Not just gradients in the colours, but in the values as well. Gradients allow for a soft, gradual flow throughout the art piece that's appealing and easy on the viewer's eyes.

Lastly, a big part of the way that I did lighting had to do with rim lighting. Rim lighting is my favourite part of the lighting process, personally, as it creates a natural outline around a 3D model while separating it from the background. I felt as though it was important to do this for some scenes, as it added a sense of two-dimensionality to this 3D rendition of an otherwise 2D cartoon! It also adds a little more depth to the scene in general and adds to that studio lighting look we were going for.

Rigging

James Correa (Rigging Supervisor): We have our own autorig and various tools and scripts that we'd developed over the last decade, the thing with those custom characters is that they are not very prone to automation, some parts of the rigs were generated and assembled together manually and some parts were designed and created to solve for the specific movements that the character needed to do, in that case it was developed entirely by hand with no automation whatsoever.

Movement

James: We also have our own techniques to achieve the desired behaviors, but none of them use any custom plugins or any custom deformers. We only use default Maya nodes; we combine them in different ways, we then chain and layer deformations together to carefully achieve what we need. For weight painting, we also have an internal tool that helps with painting, visualization, iterations, and weight relaxation. A trick that we often use to speed things up is to paint the weights on a mesh with a simplified shape and topology. We call that a skinProxy mesh. This is a cool tip and can really save you some time.

Rig controls (Kippcase) and animation of SpongeBob throwing ball (Olov Burman)

Animation

James: We definitely had more than one single challenge on this project; the bar was very high. But if we had to choose one, it has to be Bessy the Anglerfish. We didn't have much time to create this character, so the directors and we decided to optimize and create a rig that was initially only capable of doing a set of specific poses. This greatly backfired when we realized we would need much more freedom for the rig.

We had to run against time to add as many extra controls, extra features, deformers, and freedom as we could, while some of the animators were already using the current rig. This would, unfortunately, cause the rig evaluation to be very slow, and so we had to come up with solutions to get any FPS back for the animators.

We learned valuable lessons here: how the number of connections can sometimes be a bigger factor on evaluation speed than the number of nodes, the hidden value of the topology polycount, and how it can still affect us, despite our big modern GPUs, and especially, how the "early optimization" thinking can hurt you.

Olov Burman (Animation Director): The most complicated part of the animation was ensuring that the characters could perform the extreme transformations they needed to. Bessy, the anglerfish, presented a significant challenge, as she looked very different from various angles. We also aimed to keep the rig's speed as optimal as possible while minimizing the number of controls to avoid making it overly complicated.

To prevent weighing down the rigs too much, we often replaced them with a specialized rig that would work only for one extreme pose. Additionally, there were a lot of action shots throughout the six-minute film, so there weren't many easy, quick shots to complete. It took around 20 animators, each handling a few shots, to get all the work done.

VFX

David Post (Lighting Artist): The short isn’t super VFX-heavy in the traditional sense. It’s a fully 3D-animated short, but it constantly blends in the sensibilities of a 2D production, so in a way, the entire project could be considered a visual effect.

Most of the time, effects were built directly in our 3D scenes rather than added later in compositing. Having near-complete renders straight out of Blender let us see the full picture early. It helped keep the visuals cohesive between shots and true to the look of the original 2D animated show. It also made review and iteration much easier.

Compositing still played an important role, though. There was a lot of subtle cleanup, such as touching up model geometry and enhancing motion with 2D-drawn elements. In one shot, SpongeBob gets digested in the guts of a giant transparent fish. After the final render, SpongeBob was masked by hand in comp to animate him on twos while the camera and fish moved smoothly on ones. It helped keep SpongeBob’s motion snappy and consistent with the rest of the film.

I spent most of my time on that transparent fish shot, working on lighting and materials. What the animation and rigging teams pulled off in this shot was mind-blowing. It looked like SpongeBob had a new model every frame! The animation across the film was so strong, I think it pushed the rest of the team to make sure we did it justice. It added some pressure, but in the best possible way.

A lot of the craft came down to knowing when to lean into the strengths of 3D and when to apply traditional 2D techniques. A good example was SpongeBob’s shading. Relying on the 3D scene’s lighting alone would be physically correct, but wouldn’t produce the familiar ‘off-green’ for his shadows, so that shadow color is painted into the model’s texture instead.

The short takes huge advantage of moving the camera dynamically through a 3D space. You get to adjust camera angles and mess with lighting for free when you’re in 3D. But the heart of the project comes from the director and art team’s strong 2D sensibility. They value storytelling, emotion, and comedy – especially for character work and this takes priority over what might make logical sense in 3D. They see each shot in a way that’s very unique.

Conclusion

Adam: Production officially began in the summer of 2024 with storyboards and design work, and the entire project took about a year from start to finish. That might sound like a long time for a six-minute short, but the schedule reflected the ambition of the film and the fact that many of our artists worked part-time, often nights and weekends, to bring it to life.

This production wasn’t just about making this cartoon; it was also about assembling our amazing international team, building a pipeline from scratch, designing a new visual language for a show that’s been on TV for 26 years, and innovating along the way. The crew was a mix of unique specialists: ambitious animators, nimble production staff, punk-minded art directors, creative technical artists, and forward-thinking innovators, all dedicated to solving the creative challenges that came with the project.

My advice to beginning artists is to stay nimble and stay open to finding the best solution for the final product. At the end of the day, what’s on screen is all that matters. Cheat if you have to. Let it be messy in the places no one will notice. Use your tools to achieve your vision, and break the rules when it leads to something new.

Also, know your strengths and weaknesses, and surround yourself with people who complement them. Work with people who care deeply, who work hard, and who share a common goal. That’s where great partnerships are born. I’m incredibly grateful for my team.  I learned a lot every day from working with this team, and it was amazing to see both young and older artists and production staff learn from each other’s processes. There’s nothing I enjoy more than cultivating an environment where everyone inspires each other to do their best work.

In the end, this short stayed true to my vision, but it also evolved beyond what I imagined, thanks to the passion and talent of the artists who made it possible.

Lucas Santos (Technical Director): The main challenge during production was allowing our artists to work as they felt most natural. We wanted to make sure that the unique creativity of each individual working on their sections (animation, shading, lighting, etc.) came through clearly. But that happens, typically, at the expense of pipeline cohesion.

I learned that when you don't inhibit the artist from their flow, the results are a tangible, unique, artistic, and expedited result. From this need arose my task to come up with a variety of custom tools to keep our creatives focused solely on their portion, without asking too much of them, technically speaking. The most integral task was how to consolidate all the data we had coming from Maya and bring it into Blender seamlessly, despite the heavily unorthodox methods that break the norms of each program's respective environments. I think we more than succeeded at overcoming this otherwise production-halting conundrum.

Lip and Jules: Generally, in concept art, there’s research, then meetings, then thumbnails, then meetings, then sketches, and so on and so forth, ensuring that absolutely nothing can go wrong with the final set. With this project, we had to throw most of that process away.

Working in Blender, we, together with the impressive set of lighting artists, would take each set from rough block-ins to final lighting within the same file, allowing for a more spontaneous back-and-forth teamwork. If we needed another coral, we just modeled it, painted it, and threw it in the scene. If we needed more mist or more particles, we just copied them from another file. It felt very intuitive and spontaneous.

Working as quickly as possible in Blender, equipped with a painter's eye – even in the most early block-ins – is a true time-saver to quickly get a sense of the visual direction. We all loved working this way. With a reduced crew of generalists with the right tools, you can tap into all sorts of disciplines in the pipeline. We think this is the future of animation, and for newcomers to the party, the advice is: stay nimble and open-minded, take advantage of all the powerful tools available, and create some freaking content.

Pinreel Inc., Animation Company

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine