It’s been a packed few months for the project. We got our first UK award for The Aunt’s House (To join our many international ones!) So had a crew outing to celebrate!
James (Producer), Fiona (Animator), Jonathon (Animator/VFX), Paul (Director), Sonya (Animator), 1/2 of Willow (Animator)
COMIC CON
We also got to present our work at Comic Con Portsmouth last months, where we got to sit in massive regal thrones, chat about the project and present the first 10 minutes of the feature:
Here’s the teaser we did for it:
Sonya and Paul setting up.
Sonya, Paul and Fiona adorn the thrones.
It was exciting (and a little nerve-wracking) finally previewing the first few scenes of the film, and a slightly strange format I’m not used to: people were wondering in and out as they discovered the room (Standard practice for a Con). The throne room was hidden away in a maze of corridors in the rafters of the Portsmouth Guild Hall, and almost impossible to find accept by accident. We got thoroughly lost trying finding it! We kept our film on a loop for the first 1/2 hour to tempt people in, then did a Q&A when it looked at its busiest. We got a great reaction from the audience, and some insightful questions.
It has been very tempting for us to release it online and hit the festival circuit again. We’re very proud of it, and it really hits the mark for what we want the whole feature to feel like, but we’ve decided to hold off until we have a good chunk finished that can function as a satisfying and self-contained episode. Luckily the feature drama works in a way that it easily fits into an episodic format of 20-30 minute chunks.
Until then, here are a few stills and a sneak peek from the end section:
The start of the mountains.
Family
The coach.
Sometimes people can be nice.
The driver.
The song.
Sometimes people can be nasty.
Into the mountains.
The missing page.
Change.
The eagle.
Stina’s field.
Stina and the wasp.
The road.
And here’s a sneak peek of the end of the sequence: Stina’s peace and quiet is being interrupted again, for the second time!
BREAKDOWNS
We had a lot of different technical and creative challenges on this sequence. Here’s a quick look at a few of them:
THE WASP
For the wasp we chose to base it on the very spooky-looking thread waist wasp:
It’s unnaturally thin and long looking abdomen was perfect for our world and our protagonist’s mental state. The original model was built by one of our graduates: Sonnie Harris, using ZBrush:
We then rigged it in Maya ready for animation:
And then added it into the final Unreal scene, with shaders, lighting and environment :
The animation of it was based on real-world thread waist wasp reference, and to our surprise the closer we got to replicating its real-life movement and posture, the more sympathetic it got! Even weird-looking bugs need love! (Personal wasp opinions may apply.)
NAUGHTY SCHOOL KIDS
We really wanted our coach to feel alive with the chaos of a school trip. For that there was no short cut but to have a lot kids misbehaving around the main action of our protagonists. Although sound design and foley did a lot of heavy lifting here, we still wanted the visual chaos happening just out of frame, so we set about motion capturing as many scenarios as we could, with the students donning mocap suits in our CCIXR mocap studio:
Left to right: Borka, Lloyd, Willow, Margarita
To get the performances into Unreal we pushed the motion capture through Unreal’s Metahuman system, crafting a collection of different characters to populate the coach. For the cloth we used enveloped meshes, rather than the Marvellous Designer simulated cloth we’d been using for our hero characters. (This was to save on production time and data size; hero cloth data can be 10s of GBs big!)
Once the characters were ready, we placed them around the bus seats to add some life around the main action:
BULLY GIRL CLOTH
For a shot with a group of girls bullying our protagonist we wanted the cloth to feel physical; we wanted to get close into the action. For that we decided to go back Marvellous Designer, and simulated the clothes moving over exported Metahuman geometry:
We then added the texture and colour in Substance Painter:
And finally put it all together in the finished shot:
WHAT’S NEXT?
We are now continuing on with our next chronological scene, and will be doing further scenes until we have the 20 – 30 minutes we need for episode#1.
We meet a lot more characters over the next few scenes, so are currently spending some time designing and making all the assets we need before we start working with the motion capture data.
Here’s a look at the militia costume currently under development in Marvellous Designer and Substance Painter. This design forms the backbone of a lot of the outfits that will make an appearance over the next few scenes (And there’s something vaguely familiar about it!) :
That’s all for now!
More news soon as our story unfolds…
