Week 99 – Touch ups

posted in: Compositing | 0

Hey everyone,

Things are looking up here at the studio! We’re in the very last rush before the film is finally done, our sound designer Mark Donis is making great progress with the sound recording, and our music composers Daniel and Deryn Cullen have finished composing the score for the entire film. They still have to record all the live cellos and do all sorts of adjustments before it’s final, but it already sounds like a real masterpiece. We cannot wait to let you hear it!

Right now the timing of the film is locked and there will not be any more changes to the animation, but we still have a lot of tweaks to do on the compositing of the first half of the film. We have a first pass of comp for all the shots, which means all the layers were created and tested to be sure there were no bugs in the rendered frames, and now we just have to embelish the overall ambiance.

The pipeline we found to be the most effective is the following : I’ll draw over the first comps in Photoshop to get a good feel of what we want, and once it’s approved, Thomas and Carl can use it as reference to make the shots better.

Here’s a couple of shots we did recently (click to see in full size) :

legouffre_paintover1

legouffre_paintover2

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That’s all for now. Thanks for dropping by, and see you next week for the last update of the year 2013!

12_18_thom

Week 91 – Last stretch!

posted in: Compositing | 1

We’re back with our classic Wednesday night updates!

For the people who are new to this blog and didn’t know it yet, we post the latest news on the film every two weeks, generally along with a video or exclusive images. It’s been a while since the last update because we were so busy with the Kickstarter campaign, but we finally have enough time again. This week, we’re showing you an image from the beginning of the film, which Thomas just finished comping yesterday :

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Now, you probably know this movie will be done this Spring 2014. For those who are wondering what that means exactly, here’s what’s left to do :

Animate 17 shots (David and Carl)
Composite 30 shots (Thomas)
Have Entropik compose and record the music (this january)
Supervise the sound design (which our friend Mark Donis will start working on very soon)
…and plenty of color calibration, the sound mastering and of course the final export

As you can see, there’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re thrilled to finally see this coming to an end! We’ll keep you up to date on the latest developments, and until then, Happy Halloween to everyone!

10_23_thom

Week 69 – SODEC News

posted in: Animation, Compositing | 0

You might remember those papers we filled a few months ago for the grant? Well, we received the answer last friday and unfortunately, we didn’t get it.

It’s a little sad since we really counted on that money to help us work through the end of this film. It means we’ll have to change our plans a little, but one thing is certain, we’re not giving up! In fact, we’re relieved to finally know what’s going on, these last three months felt like an eternity!

So, for this week’s post, we have another short animation clip to show you. This time, it’s about the villagers taking cover inside the mill before of the storm. Try to imagine it with rain and thunder!

Also, we’re currently reworking some old compositing scenes and it’s just getting better and better! Here’s one we just finished – it’s not necessarily the most dramatic, but at least it doesn’t have any spoilers!

Well, that’s it for this week. Thanks for coming, and see you soon!

Week 61 – Rain and Mist Effects

posted in: Compositing, Effets | 0

Hey everyone!

We’re back with a little tutorial, this time showing the technique we use to generate our rain and mist effects. We were asked if our effects were done in 2D or in 3D, well the answer is : a little bit of both! Even if the mist is rendered directly in our 3D scene, it’s actually being created along a grid without thickness, of which we render a foreground and a background version. It’s then in compositing that we premultiply it with our luminance depth pass to achieve the illusion of depth.

Yeah, we know, it’s probably a tad too technical for those of you who don’t do any 3D, but hey, we’ll make up for it another week!

By the way, all our effects are created using a plug-in for Softimage that’s called Exocortex Slipstream (http://exocortex.com/products/slipstream). The results are really nice and we always save a lot of time. If you haven’t already done so, go check out their demo, it’s worth it!

And now, here’s a video showing you all the steps of our technique :

So that’s it, we hope this was instructive. See you next time for more news about Le Gouffre!

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