A Much Overdue Update!

I'm still alive! (Just about...) Anyway, here is a very overdue update on my progress. With two weeks left I am currently living a manic life; shut away in my room working 16-18 hour days - 6 days a week, living off Lucozade and takeout. It's really hard work but i'm hoping it will all be worth it when I sit down and watch the final thing...and then sleep for a week. 

I have a large chunk of the film 'finished' now. I say that because obviously i'd love to do more and spend more time on certain bits but the extremely tight deadline (who thought it'd be a good idea to do a 2 minute short film in three months?!) means I have to put things away on some shots and call it a day. Below are a selection of final renders from the finished shots. Please excuse the water marks and any motion blur. 

Here's to the final push!

Friday Night Sketching

...Living the dream huh? Not usually a fan of my own sketch work - and I don't tend to sketch straight into Photoshop too often - but I quite liked this one. This is the same creature from the first test shot, and will hopefully go on to be the basis of the next shot i'm working on. 

Tree Dwellers

Some more creatures; these guys are like reptilian monkey/lemur type animals. They reside in the top most branches of the jungle canopy as they're cold blooded and wouldn't get the warmth they need from the sun on the ground.

Cuties

Not all the creatures that inhabit this jungle are strange and/or sinister looking... 

I had to get the cute out of my sytem! Plus these guys and their non-threatening ways have an important role to play. When Andy sits down and spots them she is comforted by the fact that not everything in the jungle is scary, which allows the narrative to continue one to the next environment. 

Shot Progression

Yesterday I got to a stage where I could start doing some test renders for the first shot of Trionfi. I wasn't happy with the test renders coming out of Max so I started rendering the shot properly in layers and took these into Fusion for some experimental compositing. I was very happy with the result and think this is definitely the kind of aesthetic I am aiming for with the film. Below i've put a shot progression, from initial thumbnail sketch, through to storyboard and then to render and final comp. This is the shot where Andy comes to in the jungle, the camera shows her POV as she looks up into the face of a very strange looking creature. It's nice to see how things can progress to a somewhat complete article, it keeps me going through the increasingly long nights!


Here's to a long summer! 

Initial thumbnail sketch.

Cleaned up storyboard panel with stand in design.

Render from 3DsMax with final character design and environment assets.

Final comp from Fusion, using rendered layers. 

Production starts!

The deadline for my pre-production was a few weeks ago now. I was happy with the final result, managing to get hundreds of sketches and designs, and thousands of words collated into a printed folder of 67 A3 pages in just 5 weeks. I'm careful not to refer to it as 'finished' as nothing ever is, and if I had more time there's definitely more i'd have liked to have done! 

Anyway, after a fantastic and productive trip to FMX in Germany I gave myself a week off before starting production. I'm doing a bit of everything at the moment so there's not a great deal of finished stuff to show. I'm working on the fantasy jungle environment at the moment, below are some quick renders of individual assets. 


[Lighting on the pear and grape type berries was done by Dan Grover.]

Fortune Teller Character Design