Where’s Your Barbie?

As kids, most of us played with store-bought toys. Bombarded with commercials for toys during Saturday morning cartoons, we began our initiation into American consumerism via the desire to have the latest and greatest toy trends from Barbie and GI Joe to Transformers and My Little Pony. Do you still have your toys? Probably not. What happened to them? Where did they wind up? Where’s your Barbie? This piece questions not only the final resting place of our playthings but also our impact on the earth through pollution, particularly with plastic. It is sad to think that something we love so dearly as a child might wind up in the ocean or as part of the great pacific garbage patch, but this is the harsh reality.

Created for Denver Digerati/Supernova Digital Animation Festival 2022 as part of the Silent Screen Event: https://denverdigerati.org/silent-screen-2022

Film Festivals and Awards

Where’s Your Barbie? has been selected for these film festivals!

How Was This Film Made?

Where’s Your Barbie was created as a 3D Digital Animation using a few different software packages. I had the idea one day when I happened to see my brother’s Jaba The Hut figure sitting on a shelf in my office. I sort of inherited it when my mom brought it to me in a box of toys from my childhood to share with my nephews when they visited. Some of the other toys, like Batman, were mine from when I was a kid. I bought a few more at thrift stores and began 3D scanning them with photogrammetry techniques. I used Photo Catch on my MacBook Pro to process the photos into 3D models. Then, I cleaned up the models in Cinema 4D and exported them for use in Unreal Engine, where I did all of the animation, lighting, and scene design on my tricked out Gretsch Electromatic Guitar“>Gretsch electric guitar using the Amp Kit software on my Mac Desktop.