Rob Zilio on The Little Girl & The Alien and the art of world domination

In Rob Zilio’s The Little Girl & The Alien, a young girl finds an unlikely ally to help her with the challenges of her day-to-day life. The girl has a difficult day: After a bird steals her sandwich, bullies laugh at her. This changes when an alien crawls out of a nearby trash can and helps her get her sandwich back — and enacts her revenge on not just her bullies, but the city as a whole.

Created as part of Mercury Filmworks' shorts program, The Little Girl & The Alien uses cutout character rigs animated in Harmony Premium. The short is filled with small touches and attention-to-detail, from the texture of the little girl’s tartan skirt to the jittery line boil. We caught up with Rob Zilio to talk about The Little Girl & The Alien, passion projects, and his experience working at Mercury Filmworks.

The Little Girl & The Alien is such a creative short! Who collaborated on this project?

I started the project with a work friend, and he ended up leaving Mercury at the time. I was like, “You know what? I’m just going to continue this project. It’s fine.” 

When the second round of shorts came up, I already had all the builds with the final designs. It was just me working on it, and having input from my friends. I think I ended up finishing a few months before everyone else because I was way ahead with the rigs and compositing.

What did the planning stage of this project look like?

It was really straightforward because I had the idea for a long time, even before I started animating. I started as a designer, so I didn’t know how to make animations at the time. And I thought, “I have ideas I could animate one day.” One of them was The Little Girl & The Alien. I knew exactly what to do in my head — characters, boards.

How would you describe the process of rigging and animating the characters?

Rigging was a lot of fun. I never imagined myself as a rigging artist. In other jobs I rigged characters even though I was an animator. Once I started working at Mercury I discovered a whole universe — how to make things way easier and more complex. 

The way I rig my characters is the way that they rig the characters on my current production. It’s the same studio quality. I went for it and it took about a week-and-a-half for each character. I have the complete rigs. Even though I had to have full-body shots of some of the characters, building the rigs was challenging but a lot of fun.

Animating was pretty straightforward. Instead of putting in a lot of keys, I spaced them out. It gives that nice slow-mo feeling and saved a lot of time on polishing at the end. 

How did you manage to animate the little girl’s plaid skirt? Why did you choose such a challenging pattern?

Her skirt was looking way too empty with full organic texture. On the production I currently work on the main character wears a skirt. It’s not plaid, but it has some texture on it. 

There’s a tool that we didn’t have back in the day. It’s the Free Form Deformer node in Harmony. That helped me a lot with the skirt and textures. So it was easy, in a way. The contrast of her pink collar and green dress looks nice. 

How did you accomplish the jittery line boil effect?

I cheated on that one. Every character is on a PNG sequence, and I just tossed them in After Effects. I got the boiling line using a very small wave warp on the sequence.

What challenges did you face in producing “The Little Girl & The Alien?”

I think the most challenging thing was getting the compositing done at the end to give the vibe of the evil alien dominating the world. The most challenging thing was getting that shot to work. 

I decided to add this glow when the alien is about to shoot the lasers. I wanted to make that effect really nice. So it took me a while to nail it. It’s very hard to notice, but I notice. When he’s about to shoot the lasers, there’s lighting coming out of his mouth. It’s such a small detail but I love it. I look at it and I’m happy. 

How would you describe the reaction to this film so far?

It’s been good. Once I was starting animation and comp, I knew which friends I was going to ask for advice. Once they said, “you know what? I think you're good,” I knew the project was going well.

After releasing The Little Girl & The Alien, I also shared it on my Instagram, and I received a lot of love and compliments from my friends. And that’s all that matters to me. Getting some people in the industry commenting on my stuff and following me — I was like, “Wow! I think I did something right here!”

What projects are you currently working on? What do you hope to work on in the future?

I moved to Canada not too long ago. My first job in the animation industry here was at Mercury and I started working on The Ghost and Molly McGee. We’re on season two right now and I’m still on it. I haven’t changed shows. 

A lifetime dream would be getting my own series, and working on pitches all day. I have my own scenes at home that I’ve tested; I talk to my friends about ideas and I try to write pitches all the time. So working on my own series will be the next big thing for me. Until then, I’ll keep working here at Mercury.

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• Hungry for more art from Rob Zilio? Be sure to follow Rob on Instagram.
• Looking for more artist-driven animated shorts? Check out Mercury Filmworks' YouTube channel.
• Think you have what it takes to join the team at Mercury Filmworks? You can find current job openings on the studio's recruitment page.