Hello everyone,
In Waves is a 2026 movie directed by Phuong Mai Nguyen, based on a graphic novel made by AJ Dungo. It’s about the true story of love between AJ and Kristen, their passion for surfing and their fight against illness.
The movie is about to be released in theaters in July 2026, it was already broadcast in Cannes film festival, and it’s going to be at Annecy’s Animation festival from June 21 to June 27.
Some trailers :
Not sure they released english versions yet…
I had the great pleasure to work on that project across nearly two years.
My role was the supervision of water/ocean 3D effects, which involved tool developments, lookdev, a lot of tests and eventually doing the actual shots with a small team of talented artists.
Part of the challenge was to match the style of the concept arts, and find tools that would work for over and underwater shots, under very different lights and weather conditions, and all many other different shots specifics. Once we where done, it was handed over to 2D FX for additional elements and finally compositing department put everything together and bring another layer of awesomeness over everyone’s work .
The characters are actual 3D models converted to Grease Pencil with additional 2D animation on top of it.
That technique was developed by the awesome Christophe Seux, which you may actually know for his famous classroom blender scene. You can see an earlier version of the conversion from 3D to grease pencil explained here :
That system was completely re-written for In Waves, taking advantage of geometry nodes which wasn’t available at that time…
Obviously there is a lot of interesting stuff to share about FX as well, which I intend to do a bit later once the movie is released and the dust has settled.
In the meantime, for a quick breakdown…
One of the first concern we had, was the need of a tool to make waves that we can control to match perfectly the storyboards from shot composition to timing. Another challenge was that the layout department will setup those wave, so these tools have to be simple to operate since we weren’t in the same room.
We decided to build a wave tool based on a very similar technique than this one :
The fun thing is that @benny7770 was working on their setup exactly at the same time I was looking into it at the studio, so while I couldn’t share production files and tech details, we had very interesting discussions and brainstormed around the technique in that thread. That’s probably worth checking if you’re interested in building something similar yourself.
Then, once we had 3D waves and a water surface the next step was how we deal with stylized rendering . And for that we basically developed tools to “paint” 3D strokes onto the 3D surface, a bit like if it was a texture. So we had a huge range of geometry nodes tools for particles and curve based strokes effects, that we can use to art direct the shot and basically paint light onto the surface without relying on actual lights or regular 3D material surface, but rather more like you would do with paint and brushes.
And beside these strokes effects we had a lot of billboard based particles effects and shaders for splash and more “volumetric” foam effects…
Finally, some 2D FX where added by Antoine David’s team, and then everything was put together in comp under the supervision of Matthieu Garcia Marin who did an amazing job as well !
The movie was done across several studios :
I worked at ADV studio which was in charge of pipeline, modeling, rigging, FX and rendering.
Gaoshan Pictures were in charge of Layout, 3D Animation and backgrounds painting and camera mapping.
Silex Film did all the story and visual development, backgrounds, 2D animation and FX, and compositing.
And Aromate did some 2D anim and compositing.
I won’t lie that I had a blast working with so many amazing people on such a great project, doing cool visual explorations and tech stuff. This production is definitely going to hold a special place in my heart 
And that’s about it for a first round of information. I could probably keep talking endlessly about it so feel free to asks if you have any questions ! I may not be able to go into some details as I was just one COG in a complex mechanics and I’m by no means an official representative of the movie. But it’s also an opportunity to have an interesting conversation around a great project !
Thanks for reading
!
