BEHIND THE SCENES

Most animated films are scripted, storyboarded then pre-visualized in 3D before actual animation or mocap production starts. In the case of this film I wanted to work in a very different way. Starting with a loose script I decided that we would allow the crowd software to 'generate' the scenes which we would then cover with different cameras. Most of the film was then figured out in editorial as we assembled the shots with music which provided much of the pacing and tempo. 

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Before doing the simulations, we worked with Beyond Capture Studios to attain the performance and overall actions, such as run, walk and climb, which we could then feed into the crowd software Golaem. 

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Our lead technical and simulation artist, Meg Coleman, would then build the scenarios we were looking for. In some ways, this film was partly created through the AI of the crowd software. We blended in actual performance takes of our actor, Arya Thakrar, into some of the crowd scenes to gain more specific actions of the lead character, Jonathan. The final level of animation was the facial expressions and things like falling bodies which we handled with keyframe animation. 

Lighting, rendering and compositing was done with RedShift and Nuke.