Mushrooms

The Duck

Confusion

Baby Caramel Girl

Pathet-o-bots

Babysaurs

Confusion:

This shot was done for a good friend of mine. On this page you can see the final shot as well as some of the elements that went into making it.

First of all here is the final shot (9.4 mb quicktime)

Simon wanted to get the effect of the entire street blowing away in the wind while the two main characters are unaffected by the whole thing.

Final composited shot.

The two main characters were shot on blue screen because they would need to stay in frame during the whole effect. The keying was quite easy even though special care had to be taken with the shadows.

Blue screen shot of main characters.

The clean plate was used with the walking people plate to create a difference matte that would enable me to put the main characters behind the extras. First though I averaged several frames to get rid of a lot of the film grain and this helped a lot in the difference key.

Cleanplate of the street.

The beach is revealed as the street is blown away. The only difficult thing here was that since the camera panned the maincharacters needed to be tracked onto the sand. There were not a lot of details though and the perspective did not fit completly so I needed to track several point and average them to get a good result.

Plate showing the beach.

First thing I did was to match the camera and build a reference model of the street. Then the empty street plate was camera projected onto the geometry. This way it was possible to texture the walls as they were disintergrating. Then it was broken into pieces and animated using a dynamic simulation.

Reference geometry in Maya.

Severeal different particle passes were rendered with the wall pieces as cutouts. The base color of the wall was used to colour the emitted particles.

Particlepass shown in Maya.

Particle instancing was used to create a layer of random medium size pieces to bridge the gap between dust and chunky bits.

Utility and depth layers also helped in the final composite of the particles.

Several prominent pieces were hand animated in Maya and comp to make sure they had the right movement.

Shot statistics:
Final Frames: 2.250
Source layers: 7
Rendered layers: 17 Source/Rendered frames: 13.000

Thanks to Claus Kogsbøll and Allan Steffensen who helped with animation and rotopainting.

Closeup of the main characters.