Not much to show this week, but I wanted to drop a note anyways! The team is back from the holiday break and we've been rendering about a 3rd of the film in FINAL 4K quality (some shots took about 4-8 hours per frame!). We're continuing our quest to finish the film this month. Stay tuned and happy new year!
Production Logs
Back from outer space!
Jan. 5th, 2026
Simon Thommes
Technical Artist
A lot of things changed last minute at the end of 2025 from my side, as we were rushing to make shots ready to render in final quality over the holiday break. I'm very happy how much we could still push the appeal of the film and get a head-start on rendering. This was mainly about finally going back to work on the shading of Critter and do several fixes and improvements, but there are also countless other small tweaks and improvements that impact the overall look of the film.
Preparations for the final stretch
Dec. 15th, 2025
The effects of the film are mostly final by now and the last lighting adjustments are being made! After the holiday break we will hopefully begin the final stretch of rendering the film. Before that there are countless fixes and tweaks that need to be made.
Andy Goralczyk
Director
The last two weeks I was busy finalising the Sound effects with Sander who worked with us on countless projects before. I also built the compositing pipeline and all comp blend-files for the film in preparation for the final rendering stretch. Now I'm mostly fixing errors, helping Simon to run simulations. I'm trying to do some lighting tweaks here and there. Next week, we are prepping a chunk of the film (18 shots) to be rendered over the holiday break, wish us luck!
Surfing on Solar Flares
Dec. 8th, 2025
We are currently working on the last major pieces of effects on the film. The background creatures are finally getting their textures and the final frame compositing pipeline is prepared.
Simon Thommes
Technical Artist
This week I made a setup for our solar flares. The suns are being sucked in by the black hole, so we needed a setup that integrates the manually animated flares and the volumetric render of the suns. This will still need some tweaking, but it's a great starting point so far.
Vivien Lulkowski
Art Director
It was a shorter week because of visiting the Breda Games Week event, but I managed to do some fx design and started giving the background creatures a texture painting pass!
Trails and Tribulations
Dec. 1st, 2025
The team focuses on giving our space creatures painterly motion trails and designing the effects for the the epic sun destruction scene!
Vivien Lulkowski
Art Director
For the most part I'm done with the planets, so I finally moved to paintovers and some leftover fx concepting again :)
Simon Thommes
Technical Artist
This week I wrapped up the energy blob for now, created a setup to add energy trails to all (!) creatures in the film and started work on the FX for the star being sucked into the black hole, which will continue in the next week.
Andy Goralczyk
Director
These days I'm mostly helping to integrate the effects setups into all the shots of the entire movie, fixing continuity issues and enhancing lighting and composition in certain shots. I've also uploaded a long overdue update of the edit here, which finally contains music and (WIP) sound effects! Beware of Spoilers!!
