Post-production

posted in: Post-Production | 3

Hey everyone!

Wow, who would have thought time would fly by so fast. It’s already been a month since we announced our film premiere!

First of all, we’re very proud to announce that the film is finally done… almost. Actually, we only have to visit Video Momentum one last time next week to do the final renders and that’s it! Here’s Birck Fulham doing the last color calibrations.

Momentum_1

Completing the sound mix really was quite an adventure. It all started with an intense afternoon at Syllabes studio to record the great voice actors Nicolas Charbonneaux, Charles-André Gaudreau and Élisabeth Forest.

Syllabes

Eli

We then spent a crazy weekend with Mark Donis, our sound designer, to finalise the sound mix.

Mark

And we did the final touches at SPR studio with Jean-Pierre Bissonnette, who did the 5.1 audio mix.

SPR_1

A lot of work in the end, but we’re very happy with the result. We really cannot wait for you to hear it on a good sound system at the premiere!

Talking about the premiere, if you’re planning to go but still haven’t bought your ticket, hurry up! The way it’s shaping up, there won’t be that many tickets left at the door. We remind you that tickets are sold at the Cabaret La Tulipe and online on the réseau Admission (though tickets are more expensive there).

So that’s it for the latest news! Now that the film is over, we can finally concentrate on finishing all the material to give to our Kickstarter backers, like the making of, the art of and the poster.

See you soon everyone!

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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

legouffre_paintover3

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

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Week 97 – Opening shot

posted in: Concept arts, Textures | 0

Hey everyone!

We’ll do a quick update this week, since we are all way over our head with all the stuff that needs to be done before Christmas…

Usually, we use rendered 3d lights to light our scenes, but we decided to do a little different for the first few shots of the film and paint the lighting directly in the textures like in a good old 2D background. As an example, here’s a matte painting for the opening shot of the film!

001_020

Happy Christmas shopping everyone! 🙂

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Week 95 – Camera Projections

posted in: Textures | 5

Only four updates left before Christmas! A little vacation won’t hurt!

With less than three shots left to animate, we can safely say that the hardest part of the film is behind us. Nevertheless, we still got a lot of texture projections to do in order to get that painterly feel we are after. Here’s a few before/after of projections that we did recently!

projection1

projection2

projection3

For those of you who are wondering why the textures were so low resolution to begin with, well it all comes down to the fact that if we added too many details on the base textures, as soon as we would have stepped back the camera we would have lost the painterly feeling. Another reason is that since the film is taking place in a lot of different areas, it would have taken forever to detail every little corner. To overcome this problem, the logical solution was to do only the minimum we needed on the initial texture work, and then paint exactly the look we wanted using camera projections once the animation was completed.

Well, that’s it, we hoped you enjoyed this post. Thanks and see you soon!

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Week 93 – Bird Animation

posted in: Animation | 0

Hey everyone!

Lately, Carl has animated a couple of birds for some shots of the beginning of the movie. Since we’re always trying to save time when we can, he found an easy way to add variety to a base cycle by using the animation mixer and a simple curve. So here’s a video demonstrating how it was done, as well as a new animation shot showing the birds in action!

Well, that’s it, we hope you enjoyed our little video. Thanks for being here, and come back soon for more news about Le Gouffre!

(By the way, David is animating right now his very last shot on the film!)

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