Breakdowns for Assembly: Life in Macrospace
My friend and partner in crime at Gecko Animation, Jonathan Lax, recently put together some breakdowns of the shots we did for our short film Assembly: Life in Macrospace, which won Best Designed short film at the suzanne awards last year. Have a watch if you’re interested in how it was made.
All of the CG shots were done in blender, though some of the fluid sim was done with realflow and then imported into blender as .obj files using a little python script I wrote. The rendering was all done in blender internal, and post processing with a mix of blender and After Effects. We mainly used AE for the depth of field as blenders defocus node is kind of slow and has some issues with foreground blur, whereas the Frischluft lens blur plugin for AE is pretty darn fantastic. The grading and other effects were all done with blender.
If you haven’t seen the original itself you can find it here.
2011 Models
Here are some models I made over the past year, I put together some turntable renders for a little showreel. Most of these are modelled in blender/sculpted in zbrush. The turntable renders were done with v-ray and composited back in blender.
Assembly: Life in Macrospace
Done for Gecko Animation Ltd, which I am now a part of!
A short experimental piece featuring a blend of Macro Photography and CG Animation. It started with an idea from David Parvin, of Two Rivers Partnership, involving abstract forms and macro photography. With the footage shot, Jonathan Lax and myself worked on constructing a narrative from the forms we saw by combining CG elements with the original footage.
The CG elements were all done in blender (though some of the fluid sim stuff was done with RealFlow) and rendered in BI. Lots of animated node materials for the shifting surfaces and displacements.
Credits:
Director of Photography – David Parvin
Live Action Shoot – David Parvin, Jonathan Lax, Tobin Brett
CG Animation and Effects – Ben Simonds, Jonathan Lax
Editing – Jonathan Lax
Music and Sound FX – Alistair Lax
