While I’ve still yet to make some composited stills, here’s some test renders, R&D, and a little making of timelapse.

This is a basic render with slight compositing (and no grading) to give an idea of how it would look:

Some Research + Development for protrusion from skin. Eventually this method was scrapped since it was too processor heavy and it was hard to get subtle results (as opposed to the big protuberances you see in this test). However, the skin shader turned out nice.

And finally, a timelapse of the major parts of the workflow and postproduction pipeline.

Jimbo

Sculpting Detail

Clay Render

One of the projects that’s consumed a lot of time (but has been a treat to work on) are these two spots for Dutch non-profit called Stichting Lezen (The Reading Foundation).

In a nutshell: these spots aim to promote reading out loud to boost creativity and imagination. One spot is about Dutch Sesame Street presenter Gerda Havertong reading a book about sea adventures to kids, while the other spot is about Dutch journalist Merel Westrik reading about how the time is ripe to travel abroad. I give this context to all the non Dutch speakers out there.

This was one of those multi-faceted projects. It involved quite a bit of PrePro and RnD (see the earlier post on when we first tried 3D face tracking), as well as a nice amount of 2D animation before we even began shooting. Motion intern Fredrik Dejert (two Freds in the Motion Dpmt, madness I tell you!) helped out with the 2D animation as well as got to get his toes wet with some deeper compositing.

My role was that of VFX Supervisor on set, 3D tracking, and then Motion and Compositing Lead for the rest of the spots.

Here’s a Making Of video for the process involved:

I brought a Kinect on set to do a scan of whoever was going to get the VFX treatment of the illustrations popping out of the head. Usually I use Manctl Skanect for the scans, but seeing as to how I was on a Mac platform on set I had to find an alternative: KinectToSTL. The main reason why I like Skanect is that you can get a fairly decent 3D 360 turnaround relatively painlessly, whereas KinectToStl gives you a scan that looks like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Basically that means having to stitch up a front scan and two profile scans together in C4D later.

The reason for the scans? To assist in 3D geometry tracking – I find that the quirks of an individuals face helps the tracker substantially and gives a cleaner and smoother track quicker. Quirks such as bridge of the nose, or interesting forehead inclination, nose angle, etc…

2D animation was done in After Effects, and then 3D animation and reveals were done in Cinema4D using mostly MoGraph and the occasional dash of the popular polygon unfolding script by Rown.

When it came to compositing, it was fairly straight forward with rotoing and masks for the background layers/planes. However for the foreground we had some difficulties: the subtleties of overlapping hair. The solution for this was to simulate sections of hair where each foreground layer was, and then use that rendered hair as a luminance matte. While not perfect, it was a makeshift approach that

The end result is a mix of nice 2D animation layered in a 2.5D space.

Director: Tobias Pekelharing
Creative Director: René Klinkhamer
Producer: Severien Jansen
Ilustration: Eva Galesloot (via Shop Around)
Motion, VFX and Animation: Fred Huergo & Fredrik Dejert
Sound design: Sander Houtman

Taking a cue from a reddit user freda42, I made this fish who I’ve named Bop.

In any case, here’s one part of the environment.

Breakdown

I always forget that Vimeo’s encoding can get crunchy and/or messy when you’re dealing with thousands or millions of particles, so here’s some stills.

There might be some slightly nsfw content in there. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The results are far from final, but good enough to show the client our approach. Something not featured in the video is how we used a Microsoft Kinect to do a scan of Chris’s face to help us out when we incorporated Object/Geometry Tracking.

Besides that we took the reference photos, applied them to a base mesh that somewhat resembled Chris, but lacked the details of the Kinect scan. Both proved to have their pros and cons, but in the end the Kinect scan was the clear winner for more precise results.

Besides that we also made our own prototypes for tracking rigs, all purchased from the market around the corner (handy!). Our first attempt was a headband with 3 sticks attached to it, with tracking markers at the end of said sticks. While that gave us lots of parallax and tracking data, it wasn’t sturdy enough and the wiggling around was giving us bad data.

Our solution was to acquire an Orgasmatron (weird name, I know), and attach a single (but larger) tracker on top. The latter tracking rig yielded the best results, so we plan on developing that one further for the actual project.

And here’s some screengrabs of what you don’t get to see in the video.

Backstory

A few months ago Alex Marín set up a meeting between myself and the band Gérmen 00 to make a music video for an 8-bit/chiptune song. The project was pro-bono, allowing me full creative control. It was both an exciting and daunting proposition, but I was all for it.

Alex and I started banging out story ideas and finally focused on one. Then proceeded to work with Sarah Goodreau on developing the look and feel of the characters; in this case a stranded spaceman and a pirate girl trapped inside a whale.

My initial idea was to go literal with the idea of the 8bit: I did some tests with some 8bit characters, but that was proving to be too time-consuming for a one-man-job. Then I shifted over to a voxel approach – while it looked good, it wasn’t providing enough mobility and facial expressions where being a problem. This is where I brought in the extra help of Ida Andersson to help me with character rigging, and I-Nu Yeh to help me out with different facial expressions. Once I got their help, it felt like I was set.

I started working on the opening scenes… and as it turned out, the facial expressions and the movement was being entirely too time-consuming and the end result was far from satisfactory – imagine detailed models and environments, but clunky character animation and jarring facial expression transitions. It was being really hard to make it work.

Then I resorted to another approach – “What about pixelating everything so it gives it an 8Bit look?”. I brought my renders over to After Effects, and gave it the pixel treatment. The stills looked really good, I was certain this was the approach. But then seeing it in motion, all the pixels were moving entirely too much and it was distracting and took away from the look and feel. I was stumped, and certain that this project would never get done.

Fast forward to a month later, I revisited the project and checked out my animatic. I realized that maybe a good approach was to embrace the lo-fi quality of what is known as a playblast (or a hardware render in C4D). Then on top of that, not only embrace it, but put it in what seemed like a command-prompt media player from the early CG days, something akin to Ed Catmull’s A Computer Animated Hand. Added fluff: an image sequence counter, a CPU processing log chart, an FPS counter, and of course the name of the media player. That, along with a treatment to sharpen the edges but make it look old, made for what I think is a good salvage.

Conceptually, the current style works. It’s got that lo-fi, mix of what seems like analog meets digital (or vice-versa?), and thematically also works with the song.

Now, to move onwards towards what didn’t make the cut, but was crucial for the development.

Research + Development

Even though none of this made it to the final version, it was a long journey and gives reference to what I mentioned in the backstory.

Character Development

Voxel + Pixel Turnarounds

Facial Expressions

Pixelated Motion Tests

Styleframes

While these look good, in motion… not so much. The last one, characters were a problem.

So there you have it. As you can see, I tried a lot of different approaches, and they each worked in their own way, but each had major flaws. It got to the point that I was not going to finish or release it, but I’d rather find a happy medium than just abandon a project.

It’s a bit sad to see all this potential – maybe one day with a bigger team, budget, and time it can all be made to work.

CREDITS:

Director/3D: Fred Huergo

Producer: Alex Marín

Script & Story: Fred Huergo, Alex Marín

Concept Sketches & PrePro Assets: Sarah Goodreau, Ida Andersson, I-Nu Yeh

It’s not everyday that David Byrne’s label Luaka Bop contacts you to make an old-school 2D animation chronicling the life of a funk star. On top of that, I can’t say that I would usually record a voice-over with Devendra Banhart – but in this case the stars aligned quite magically and I’m happy this project is finally live.

Myself, fellow SuperHero David Schagerström, and Zoltan Korai worked on animating the illustrations made by Shop-Around’s Momo & Sprits.

If you’re in NYC you might see the poster around – if not, here it is, with my name in it and all that jazz.

De Pijp is dutch for The Pipe – it also happens to be the neighborhood that SuperHeroes HQ is at. Throw a bit of Duchamp mixed with some of this trendy low-poly style and you get this neighborhood: