Full video coming here very soon!
1942, London, in a secure top secret underground bunker, a man works on his latest invention for the war effort; Small Boy. Small Boy is an automatic sentry gun, capable of identifying enemies using its onboard camera and radar. Once activate the gun can think for itself.
This project was undertaken by Ashley Blyth and myself. We based the project in a period that interested both of us; World War 2. After preproduction, Blyth worked on the 3D while I worked on the set and props. Then I moved on the post production compositing stage. Richard McEvoy-Crompton also contributed with props, costume and our actor. I only breakdown my work flow, so for more information on their work visit their sites.
Figure I & II: Before & after shot 1
Figure III & IV: Before & after shot 2
Process
Concept & Research
The first thing I did was visit the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, which I recommend. It’s a great source for inspiration. I recorded photographs and videos of machinery, tools and propaganda especially from the 1940s period. I’ve published these files online, click to download [16mb rar].
Figure V: Colour grade mood board
Mood boards are great for finding inspiration and creating a clear vision of what the finished piece should look like. Essentially they’re a collage of artworks from photography, film, video games and paintings. Deviant Art is usually my favourite place for mood boards. The image above is a sample from my colour grading mood board. I created these for colours, objects, character and shot composition. They were printed and stuck on the wall just above my monitor as a constant reminder.
The next step was to collect images and watch historical videos (World War 2 Complete History is well worth a watch if you can find the British version). We collected images of the type of gun we wanted to create. We wanted to customise it but still fit in with the period. Malcolm Watts sketched some concept art, shown below.
Figure VI: Small Boy concept art by Malcolm Watts
Props
As Small Boy was in production, I created props to sell the period. Firstly the posters. These were created within Photoshop at A1 print size (300 dpi). These were then printed at A1 size using University printers. The posters were created using research images of propaganda posters from the period.
Figure VII & VIII: Propaganda posters created in Photoshop
The colours used in the posters matched the colour theme for the project (red & green). The colours weren’t very saturated because I wanted them to match the printing capabilities of technology in that time. The highlights were shades of yellow rather than white and the dark tones were greys.
Technically, the posters were made to be none destructively and with the intention of it being able to up scale them without quality loss. They were drawn with vector shapes (with the pen tool). I wanted the posters not to feel computer made but by hand with scratches, marks and colours to look hand painted, shown below.
I used masks to get the painted effect. The painted mask is multiplied to the layer. This means you can erase (by painting it black) parts of a layer without losing the data. Paint it white and it reappears. A graphics tablet was used to get the strokes, which is much more natural than a mouse. Marks and scratches were added on a separate layer on top.
If you fancy a print of the posters, or even a postcard, you can do that at Deviant Art.
Figure IX: Poster details to make the posters feel hand made
The second part of the props creation was ration packaging and papers. I began by buying cheap (Sainsburys basics) food jars, tins and bottles. I measured the packaging and receated it to scale in Photoshop. Again using the research images, I created my own rationing packaging. Because all rationing has the same basic structure and style, I copied the original template onto all the other packaging and tweaked it. I created packaging for paper, potatoes, teabags, tuna, jam, curd, salmon, cola, fruit drops and so on. Lastly I spray painted the lids and caps of the food black, which hid sell by dates but also matched the guns (Small Boy) colour palette. In case you’re wondering, I ate all the food after shooting.
Next was the papers, which included newspapers and ID papers. Again, measured to scale and styled from reference images. The newspaper is shown below in figure XI.
Figure X & XI: Printed props on set
3D
As mentioned the 3D process was undertaken by Blyth, so I won’t be going into detail on his process. One of the aims of working together was to allow both our processes, 3D and compositing, to over lap so we’d both learn new skills. We had intended to have a 3D vintage radio in shot, but it was eventually replaced with a can of beans (I’ll explain in the compositing breakdown). So I modelled the radio early on in production, Blyth investigate it and showed me better methods and how to work efficiently (with short cuts and working at lower poly). The radio, shown below, didn’t get past the modelling stage.
Figure XII: Render of 3D radio with Maya & Mental Ray
Filming
There was two parts to the filming process. First was the actual shoot with the actor. Second was creating dust particles, shown below. To sell the period, I wanted the room to shake and dust to fall from the ceiling, as if the Luftwaffe were bombarding above.
I used a sophisticated tool to pour dust above the camera (a plank of wood with a plant pot attached). I used soil and flours to make a concrete texture. I made different ratios so I had footage of light dust and solid clumpy concrete. I set it up outside firstly because it caused a lot of mess, but secondly because of the lighting. Outside was light but cloudy, meaning the light was diffused which prevent shadows on the screen. The green screen was independently lit by a light to brighten it.
Figure XIII: Filming dust particles
The main shoot was filmed in an old factory mill on University campus, which had lots of open space and hadn’t been touched in decades. The camera was locked on a tripod, meaning it didn’t move. It’s position and angle was recorded. The room was measured as well as furniture (desk & shelves). This data was used to recreate the room in Maya to get the correct angle of the gun, as well as the shadows and reflections around it.
Compositing
The first thing you may notice about shot 1, figure I, is that there is a man stood in the shot. He was a reference marker for the actor. He stood exactly where the gun should be. The marker man, as we’ll call him, walks in shot after 5 seconds. This means I have 5 seconds of clean plate. I looped this 5 seconds and merged it on top the raw plate, but with the right half masked. I looped 5 seconds rather than taking a still frame because this method left me with realistic film grain, rather than it being static.
After this the most important aspect was compositing 3D gun. Blyth rendered a wealth of passes, some shown below. These passes were added together (because light is additive) and then multiplied by a matte. This left them transparent, and able to merge as the foreground onto the footage. Before merging I converted the images from linear to monitor colour space (gamma correction at 2.2). Now with these passes separate, I was able to colour correct and lower the intensity (opacity) of each aspect. Edge blur and grain was applied after.
Figure XIV: Render passes (diffuse, specular, reflection, refraction, indirect & multimatte)
To really bond the object with the environment and make it believable it needed floor reflections and shadows. Both were rendered as passes in an image sequence. I matched the reflections to the real life floor reflections (I always use real objects on set as reference). They were very subtle but still present.
The shadows are added in a different method. The shadow appears to render inverted, in that the shadow is white and the environment black. But really that’s a matte and mattes are wonderful. I used the shadow matte to mask a colour corrector. The colour corrector matched the colour of the shadows by firstly decreasing brightness and secondly saturating. To get the shadow to look correct, I sampled the colours of the fake shadow against a real shadow until they matched RGB values. The shadow matte was diffused but the shadows on set had direction. I added to the matte with a polygon to follow the shadow direction.
I also had a multimatte, shown in figure XIV. In fact I had many multimattes breaking down the gun into each part. This meant I had control over every aspect of the gun with colour corrections. I also broke the multimatte down and added them back together depending on the size of the parts. For example, the thin legs and feet were added together, while the bigger ammo box and camera were added together. This left me with mattes depending on size, which I used to lightwrap. The bigger parts of the gun needed a bigger light wrap, while the thin legs needed it to be much more subtle to prevent them going transparent.
Figure XV: Fusion flow shot 1
I mentioned earlier the 3D radio was replaced with a tins of beans. Compositing the gun demonstrated the same techniques as the radio wouldn’t be beneficially for the project (because this was a University assignment). We wanted the gun to interact with the world though by shooting an object. Blyth took the packaging I made for the rationing beans and used it as a texture. The 3D beans were placed around the real beans. I composited them to look the same. So when the gun shot the beans, the viewer wouldn’t know if the beans were CGI or real. The 3D beans fall off the shelf, crumple and roll on the floor. I masked the shelves and placed it on top of the beans to make them vanish when they fell behind.
The dust footage, figure XIII, was keyed and merged into the composition. The last major steps were colour grading and camera shake. I desaturated and then tinted green the whole composition. I masked parts of the footage, such as the posters and items on the selves, that I wanted to stand out. I lifted the gain and saturation on these. Unimportant areas of the composition were darkened and desaturated slightly, while important parts were lifted. I used a line of colour corrector nodes, in this case 6, all with different effects masks doing different corrections.
Figure XVI: Fusion flow shot 2
The processes are mostly the same for shot 2 but I’ll briefly mention it. One thing I did to shot 2 was add a specular glow, like a sort of bloom. One method is to use the specular pass and blur it. For this one, I used a ‘glow’ effect with a mask around the area I wanted the bloom. This is fine when the camera is static. The glow removed some of the film grain so I added the bloom mask to the grain node to bring it back. Now I didn’t want to draw attention to just the 3D, so I added a bloom to real objects on set such as the typewriter, using the same method on the specular highlights. The bloom helped blend the CGI with the footage.
The last nodes were the 3D camera shake section. I’ve mentioned how to do the shake in other breakdowns, but the footage is input into a 3D plane and a 3D camera rotates to create a wobble. This saves time rotoscoping and tracking while achieving the same effect. I used an expression to get a gentle shake, which is the quickest way. Now, when the gun fires the camera dramatically moves. I animated this by hand with a series of key frames which effected numerical values in the expression.
Figure XVII & XVIII: Original composite & with specular glow
That should give a general over view to the project, if you want any more details comment below and thanks for taking interest.
- Credit
- Liam Major Compositor, Props & Concept
- Ashley Blyth 3D Modeller, Texturer, Unwrapper, Rigger & Animator
- Richard McEvoy-Crompton Costume, Props & Actor
- Software
- Autodesk Maya 3D modelling, rigging & animation
- Adobe Photoshop Props & texturing
- Eyeon Fusion Compositing
- Pixologic ZBrush Texturing
- Client
- Bolton University Final assignment
- Duration
- 12 weeks (during 2 other projects)