Production Logs

Since we want to start animating as soon as possible, I wanted to get a head start building the Ice Belt set for the beginning of the film. I continued working on the previs for the film's ending to lock the shot timing as much as possible. There are two new versions of the edit, but beware of spoilers!

The past two weeks I've cleaned up the sculpt of Critter with a more relaxed resting pose for retopology & rigging. The retopology is also quite unique for our productions with some shapekey testing to try out different techniques for deforming the eyelids.

This week I mostly focused on the surfacing and look of the ice crystals from Andy. We also wanted to try experimenting with the glowy bits that critter eats and how that is distributed on the crystal.

My goal for this week was designing the vista of the Ice Belt in the first shots of the film when we introduce Critter and his world. I sculpted all the big shapes by hand, making sure there is a good spacing and visual rhythm to them. I also did some initial brush shading experiments.

This week I went through more of the previs to add more information (camera work and acting beats) and plus it as much as possible, within the scope of previs. This extra information also helped vet certain ideas and let us know if they were working or not. In a few cases alt versions needed to be made to figure out the best way forward. I would go into more specifics but then I would be entering spoiler territory, so check it out for yourself!

This week was focused on nailing down Critter's design as best as possible so Modeling and Retopology can take over, so there was lots of painting and sculpting of everyone's favorite space gummybear axolotl.

This week we are finally diving deeper into character and environment design. I started blocking out Critter's chilly home, the Ice Belt, closely following the earlier concepts by Beau and Vivien.

This week I went over some of Andy's previs work and pushed it a bit further to clarify the story/acting choices and lay the groundwork for the layout process, which will happen once we have final characters, props and sets. Overall it was mostly about tweaking the composition and staging, to help readability and flow of the edit from one shot to another. Then on the character side, adding beats to induce urgency/panic, surprise, thought process and determination. The less glamorous work also needed to be done under the hood, like making sure all the constraints were set up properly between the character, camera and floating rocks that the character interacts with.

I've been working on this film for a couple of months, creating various iterations of the animatic, concept doodles and crappy models. I'm super excited to have everyone else on the team now to work on the design and first assets. This is a small selection of my stuff, beware of spoilers!

Together with Andy and Vivien, I experimented with different crystal and ice formations. Also considering shading to achieve certain effects like the light scattering in ice. These images informed certain decisions that hopefully bring even better looking results.

Some of the stuff I did so far on the project, not just this week! Mostly I worked on Critter and some early concept art. Hopefully next week I can just on board fully and continue the exploration for the main elements of the film!