So I did a small vfx short with the help of my friends. The goal was mainly to test how capable we were of doing such filmy things.
A quick breakdown
A long breakdown
It started with me modeling a planter thingy,
Then I thought it would be nice to have a little activity around this thing, so I did a flying food truck, it took some time
Then I realised that if I wanted to make some short sequence out ouf it, I needed to plan for it. So with my friend Alexandre Thery we went to draw a storyboard : at that point there was no going back
With the camera moves planned we could proceed to film those people on green screens. At that point I did not have the whole scene properly modeled because we knew that we would made some unexpected change during filming. Waiting for the proper moment to meet I also prepared some props for the shoot, a gyoza box and a bipper-phone-future-thing :
In most cases actors were filmed separately so we could compose them more easily into the scene (also we did not have enough green screen area)
As anyone might have guessed, filming a cat is not easy, that is not the kind of animal you can ask to stay in some place. So I did a sneaky photoscan of the cat while she was asleep ! It turned out okay-ish except for a moving ear.
And then I spent months building and texturing the rest of the scene on Blender. There is not much to say about that without getting into too much details and I am tired and lazy.
The things we hoped we knew
A bunch of things
- properly lighting your green screen is sooooooo important (otherwise you will have yourself for it while trying to manually rotoscope people)
- film wide, then crop, that way you have more freedom while compositing/editing
- motion tracking is hard, you need to be as steady as possible (no noisy shake) put a waaaaay too muchs markers, and then light you scene properly so that you don’t get motion blur.
if you have any questions please contact me on twitter @jul_mab or by engraved marble slates sent over donkey.
Credits
Editing/sound/storyboard : Alexandre Thery
CGI/storyboard : Jules Mabon (me)
Acting : Pauline Hu, Lucie Mabon, Antoine Poussot, Josette (the cat)
Stuff holding : Islaure Herve, Stephane Cardinet
Camera supplying : Loris Dumont
3D printing : Arthur Delaitre
Music : Raphael Rossignol