This explainer film was commissioned by the BBC as part of a pilot project for BBC Knowledge & Learning, and it aims to enlighten the viewer on the fascinating truth of how we all develop from just one single cell.
This project also brought with it a fair number of technical challenges, not least how on earth to visualise a growing foetus without neither the time nor the money for either illustrations or 3D character animation. Thankfully, the Science Photo Library had just what we needed, a series of stock images of a 3D modelled foetus at various stages of development, and it's these images (along with a handful more of actual specimens) that largely dictated the backbone to the narrative of that part of the film, as we knew exactly what we'd be able to show.
The flat images didn't quite cut it for our needs though, so with the help of good old Photoshop they were cut out, their limbs were separated, and a lot of the detail from underneath them was painted back in to give us some freedom when moving the 3D camera in After Effects around the now pseudo-3D assets.