OFF
A Full CG animated film exploring the surreal experience of
an astronaut traveling through space and time.
an astronaut traveling through space and time.
Making of - vimeo.com/168141002
This is my graduation film, which I made as an Animation (BA) student at Tomas Bata University in Zlin. Never being good at traditional storytelling, it was quite a challenge for me to meet the school requirements while focusing on experimenting with CGI and different ideas and concepts. Finally a huge kick of inspiration came with Lorn’s amazing track Anvil, which in the end initiated the whole production and with his kind permission was used as a soundtrack for the film.
Not so far ago, I remember pitching the project to my school - eyes red from sleep deprivation and a week of extremely intense modeling/rigging/everything/rendering behind me. In the space of a year, the original story went from a concept through many iterations, edits, changes and reworks - without a deadline, it would have gone on for another few years! Even after a few months, the only thing I knew for certain was that the astronaut was going to be my hero of choice.
As previously mentioned, without a strict deadline I would have been tweaking and changing the story until I would throw it away, just to start again and redo everything, never actually bringing the picture to life. After a year of intensive story development, which consisted of many versions being thrown away, it was during the cold end of January when I finally started full production. This went on for the next 4 months as a never-ending rollercoaster of sleepless nights, thousands of hours of rendering, and a huge amount of data! Even though I may have been looking grumpy during this exhausting process, looking back I can say I enjoyed every bit of the bumpy ride.
A lot of people have asked me about my tools of choice. Essentially the most of the film was done using 3ds Max, rendered in Corona Renderer and composited/pre-graded in After Effects. For the final step, I used DaVinci Resolve to do the editing, grading, additional compositing and finishing.
The general workflow was actually very simple. I quickly realized that making most of the things in render was faster (thanks to daily builds with adaptivity and denoising) than doing it in compositing. Therefore most of the shots were brought to After Effects only for very basic compositing such as light adjustments, some tone mapping, grading and eventually atmospheric effects such as clouds and fog. Of course a lot of other stuff was used, but that’s for a longer article!
I hope you enjoy the film!
Thanks for visiting! Here's the poster for download :)
http://goo.gl/JzO7bL