3D Artist Bree O’Donnell Brings Magic to Life
▼ Summary
– Bree O’Donnell is an animator creating a 3D witch character named Mary, whose world is defined by a nostalgic, stop-motion-inspired style with sparkling, textural surfaces.
– Her artistic drive stems from a lifelong obsession with fantasy and magic, which led her to animation as an accessible form of worldbuilding.
– O’Donnell employs an intuitive, non-technical approach to 3D animation, prioritizing emotional expression and stylistic results over complex mathematical or procedural methods.
– Music is a foundational part of her creative process, with playlists inspiring and directly guiding the animation of her characters and scenes.
– She is developing a miniseries featuring Mary and consciously avoids using AI, viewing creative limitations as essential to fostering genuine fantasy.
Bree O’Donnell crafts a uniquely nostalgic and emotionally resonant digital world through her 3D animations, most notably with her character Mary, a witch whose universe feels both enchantingly vast and intimately tactile. Her work, shared in short clips on social media, blends melancholic emotion with ethereal femininity, using a visual style that vibrates with the textured, handcrafted quality of stop-motion animation, yet is rendered with such sparkling, computer-generated surfaces that they appear almost tangible.
In a recent conversation, O’Donnell discussed her artistic journey and the intuitive process behind her magical creations.
Her background in art began in childhood, fueled by a deep-seated need for fantasy and magic to feel real. “I was a little kid, making a million little stories on paper,” she recalls. This obsession naturally evolved into animation, which she saw as the most accessible window into fantasy and world-building. Her craft developed organically, adapting to whatever tools were available, from drawing and cel animation to the computer programs she encountered at various jobs. She describes herself as a “cel animator-turned-computer animator, but obsessed with that stop-motion world.”
This obsession is central to her aesthetic. Her work often evokes a comforting, nostalgic feeling, reminiscent of classic animated specials. She is drawn not to hyper-realism, but to the inherent warmth and safety of vintage media. “There’s something inherently nostalgic and safe and comforting about stop motion,” O’Donnell notes. When she began sculpting digitally, she carried that stop-motion sensibility with her, but became captivated by a new possibility: the way digital surfaces can sparkle and feel alive. She connects this to a very personal sensation, like the melancholy sweetness of a wet, glistening Brooklyn street after rain.
Interestingly, her approach to the technical side of 3D modeling is refreshingly intuitive and non-mathematical. “I got into art because I was like, I’ll never have to do math again,” she laughs. She often skips over complex technical procedures, preferring to click through default texture settings until something looks and feels right. She advocates for this expressive, stylized path, especially for independent artists who might feel overwhelmed by the industry-standard, department-heavy pipeline. “If you have something that you’re wanting to express… you just keep molding it and playing [with] it and you find your own way through. And that just creates a much more special result.”
Music is another vital, foundational element of her process, not an afterthought. She constantly curates playlists for different moods and ideas, a “Witch from Portsmith” list, a fairy list, a sci-fi list. When she wants to animate, she scrolls through these playlists until a song sparks a visual idea, then animates directly to the music as if in collaboration with the artist. This philosophy of responsive collaboration extends to her current major project: a miniseries featuring Mary.
She and her producer, Cath Daly, are developing the series with the intention of keeping it online, accessible to the dedicated community, mostly young women and girls, that has grown around her social media posts. O’Donnell is currently wearing nearly every creative hat: writing, directing, animating, and designing. She manages the workload by continually stepping back to ensure the work stays true to its core emotional intent. While she dreams of eventually translating her world into live-action, her current focus is firmly on bringing more of Mary’s story to life.
When asked about using AI in her workflow, O’Donnell’s answer is definitive. She has no current interest, not solely for ethical reasons, but because her entire creative relationship with fantasy is built on embracing limitation. From a childhood yearning for more to now working with a computer that has technical constraints, she finds that boundaries force a more beautiful and personal kind of invention. “The fantasy that comes out of that is so beautiful to me,” she explains. She observes that in professional conversations, an over-focus on the tool of AI can feel boring, missing the point that audiences connect with the specific emotional and feminine perspective she explores.
Her final note is a simple promise to her community: “There is more Mary coming.” She and her producer are immersed in the work daily, driven by the belief that what they are building will be something truly amazing and beautiful.
(Source: The Verge)
