Exploratory Practice Group Project (GAIA)

Main Project Video

Role: Director, Producer, VFX, Look Dev, Animation (except robot), Lighting & Rendering
Special Thanks to my Colleague, Chen Xuan for the camera animation guidance

For the idea of this project, we did it together as a group as we thought of what all of us wanted to do. TianHang wants to do modelling for robots. Yanghao (Chris) wanted abstraction with the involvement of animals/creatures. I was eager to explore the complex setup of simulating abstract plants and interesting VFX CGI. Choplat (Chay) wants to do post-production and sound design.

So knowing what we all wanted, we looked for references and came up with this story (script below). Hence, it contains what everyone wants to do.

For this project, I think the bulk of the work is on VFX as almost every shot contains some elements of CGI. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to create the setup so that the geometry that is exported from Houdini would look more natural and at the same time with a hint of abstraction.

Also did the animatics (see earlier post).

Lighting and Rendering are also quite straightforward, as it was a desert scene and we did not have too many objects to obstruct the illumination of our main subjects, we just used an HDRI to light the scene.