Mathematic

A mammoth task for both production and post. The task was to integrate fantasy characters with a live action cast to promote French Telecom company Bouygues’ new deal to combine home entertainment with its internet and communication services. Mathematic supervised on the shoot in South Africa and developed some of the 3D characters and post effects in house during pre-production. We did this to save time in post of which we only had 3 weeks to complete everything.

Top Shot and Crowd Simulation

One of the most complicated aspects of the post production was recreating (from scratch) the top shot featured in the film. A pinical point in which we see the full scale of the drama on the battlefield, the effect needed a lot of care and attention, not only to match the existing footage of the film but also to make the action seem as authentic as possible. There were a number of ways in which we recreated the shot without any footage, matte painting of course was key. We created a miniature scale version of the trees in the studio and photographed them from above. Painstakingly patchworking textures and nature elements from photos taken from the shoot and other sources to match the existing shots in the film. We also intergrated a 3D crowd and cloud effects which were comped together in Flame along with the characters. Here are 2 work in progress clips showing this process.

Character Development

All of the characters were developed in several versions both drawn, coloured and sometimes modeled in 3D. Some were validated and developmd further in the preproduction stages, ahead of the validated edit or even the shoot taking place to save time.  Check out some of the characters that didnt quite make the cut on our blog.

Lighting, skin texturing on the dinosaur…

Other 3D characters

Whether in 3D or 2D each of the characters had to portray a very specific universe. As all come from different aspects of entertainment such as movies, cartoons or documentaries the idea was to try and bring all of these diverse visual references into one place. For example the Warcraft character at the bottom had a specific simplified render to link it to gaming graphics.

2D Character and Animation

As well as all the 3D development and animation we did we were also required to work on the 2D animation in the film. Undertaking an altogether different skill it was specifically the Manga girl and Pig character which were handrawn in Flash.