LOST CARGO
a film by Pieter Engels and Efim Perlis
On his long journey, intergalactic space trucker Eugene occupies himself with mail-ordering various useless gadgets to support his lazy lifestyle. When his merchandise is attacked by a nasty disease, his little robot Han-D can no longer handle the workload. The new high-tech robot saves the merchandise at first, but when it starts taking its job too seriously, Eugene's laziness and belief in technology turn against him.
Watch the complete short on AWNtv! -> GO HERE.
VFX MAKING OF
by Pieter Van Houte
Click on each of the images to see a larger version. Higher resolution Quicktimes are also available for download.
1. Shot 005-0010 – Outer Space
2. Shot 006-0005 – The Cockpit
3. Shot 008-0030 – The Mail-Order-Transporter
5. Shot 016-0060 – The Cockpit 2
7. Shot 043-0070 – Pressure Drop
8. Screen_02 – One Of The Cockpit Monitors
One of the shots from the beginning of the movie. The only thing shot was a static sequence of the vessel. That was then matted, and animated in Fusion. Star field was added (an image cooked up with Fusion's particle editor and some nebula pictures from NASA), as well as the planet – built and rendered in Lightwave, this particular one is nothing but procedural textures. The little container is CG, an obvious choice for this, although a test with a container shot in stop motion had been done as well, however it was decided than building and animating it in CG would be more efficient than trying to clean up the rigs that were used to rotate the container... Color correction on the vessel, the exhausts' flames and heat displacements are done in Fusion as well...
Download Quicktime Movie Here.
A surprisingly tricky one, this one: the windows needed to be matted out and replaced by starfields. Sounds easy enough. However, when simply matting them out, the shot became very artificial because we lost the texture of the windows. So keep the texture. But the studio set was still visible in there as well! And the camera is moving! Lots of cutting, pasting, tracking and tweaking in this one. But we got it all done. The screens were added, all of which were done in Fusion as well.
Download Quicktime Movie #1 Here.
Download Quicktime Movie #2 Here.
Shot 008-0030 – The Mail-Order-Transporter
Pretty straightforward, this one here. The screen was added, which was also animated in Fusion before. Some faked motion blur on the rotating machine parts.
Download Quicktime Movie #1 Here.
Download Quicktime Movie #2 Here.
The reason why I added this one here is because it become an almost iconic image of the movie. In my opinion one of the simplest and beautiful. All that happened here was adding the little flashlight effect in the helmet. The puppet was too frail to accommodate wires, so it was decided to do it in post, although most flickering light bulbs in the film were actual functional lights in the sets.
Download Quicktime Movie #1 Here.
Download Quicktime Movie #2 Here.
Big metal rigs for the puppet. Wires. Shadows. A metal set which moves slightly when it gets warmed up from the lighting. Not to mention reflections and shifts in the colours when anything is moving. Nightmare. And on top of that – drum roll – no clean plates! So I used material from different frames to try and fill in the bits where the rigs were. That wasn't sufficient so what was done was try and remove as much of the rigs in certain frames as possible, and then use those frames as clean plates as well. Those are all the separate images at the end of the comp. The rest of it was patience, long evenings and lots and lots of polygon masks...
Download Quicktime Movie Here.
By the way, you can still see the rig's reflection in the window! One of those things that were left in, no one ever noticed... :-)
Download Quicktime Movie #1 Here.
Download Quicktime Movie #2 Here.
Funnily enough this shot was done about 9 months after all the other images had been finished, the sound was more or less done, etc. The thing was, this shot didn't exist. It was supposed to, but somewhere along the line it got forgotten, or scrapped while it shouldn't have been. Doesn't matter. What did matter was that the edit didn't work here. It needed an other shot. So I got material from another shot, enlarged it (with all the effects that wasn't a problem) and added all the POV effects. The shot was too short, so we held a few frames. Which then looked too obvious, so using Krokodove's Morph, I added animation on the zipper for those frames, to make it a continuous shot. Done.
Download Quicktime Movie #1 Here.
Download Quicktime Movie #2 Here.
Lots and lots of rigs and wires again here. Basically it was a matter of matting everything by hand. By the end we were so efficient in doing that, we would have beat keying any time :-). I say 'we' because in the last month of production I actually taught the director (Pieter Engels) himself how to create polygon masks in Fusion to do rig removal. So there we were, the two of us, drawing polygon masks 'till the wee hours. Good fun.
Download Quicktime Movie Here.
This scene used DF4's particle engine to do the flying dust and clouds. Fu5's engine is now so much more friendly to use, but even in DF4's I thought this was much easier to accomplish than in a separate 3D package. If only we would have had Multistrokes in the Paint node back then... :-)
Download Quicktime Movie #1 Here.
Download Quicktime Movie #2 Here.
Screen_02 – One Of The Cockpit Monitors
Download Quicktime Movie Here.
One of the animations that were used in the cockpit scenes. Just goes to show how with only a handful of nodes you can create visually rich graphics. Especially the Krokodove plugins contain quite a few nifty tools to aid just that...
As a little extra, for you people who want to have a look at the comp itself, I've put a ZIP file up containing the original comp (well, flow) and all the materials necessary to recreate that screen. Just dust off that old license of DF4 and have fun! You need a license of Komkom Doorn's Krokodove plugin suite (www.krokodove.com) if you want to have it all watermark-less... :-)
written and directed by
Pieter Engels & Efim Perlis
design
Pieter Engels
animators
Efim Perlis, Steven De Beul, Pieter Engels
photography
Tobias Reymond, Pieter Engels
technical supervisors
PEDRI animation
Peter Mansfelt, Paul Mathot
visual effects & compositing
Pieter Van Houte
sound design
Senjan Jansen, Senstudio
produced by
il Luster Productions
Arnoud Rijken & Michiel J. Snijders
&
S.O.I.L.
Geert Van Goethem & Linda Sterckx
This film was made possible with the financial support of
Netherlands Film Fund
Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds
RNTV
Thuiskopie Fonds
VPRO Television