The edit is locked, the shots are on their way to finalization, and more tool-building is underway. See how far Gooseberry has come in a week in the latest weekly livecast! Highlights below.
This week’s guests came to us all the way from the east of the Netherlands: Edwin van het Bolscher, aka 3ddy, founder of 3D Hype (a website for Dutch digital artists) and Lead Technical 3D artist at RE-lion, a studio creating VR systems for (military) mission training; Gijsbrecht dos Santos, RE-lion Software Architect; industrial engineer Marin; and Frank, RE-lion production intern.
Before the weekly, they got a peek at the latest movie edit (more on that in a bit). And after the weekly, they stuck around for windmill beers and Thai food, of course!
Our director has made a new edit! From this point forward, the timing, blocking, and dialogue will not change. But the layout will be replaced with increasingly finalized animations as we approach release. (Watch the latest edit for yourself on the Cloud.)
Mathieu has especially been focusing on tweaking the tornado shots. And this week he will focus on the two shots missing from the end of this latest edit: Franck appearing in the jungle and Victor at the laundromat.
Beorn, Sarah, and Hjalti spent this week wrapping up the first shots they have been working on — bringing the total (almost) finalized animation time to four minutes, or almost half of the pilot! You’ll, of course, find all these animations in the Gooseberry section of the Blender Cloud. Or click on the links to the individual team member folders below.
Beorn finished the shot where Franck reaches the cliff.
Hjalti is just finishing up the final post-splining fixes for the sequence where Victor gets his timer. You can see this shot evolve over the week (including a creepy hairless version, screenshot below) through partial lipsyncing and more via the six versions in his folder.
And this is why the hair system is so important!
New shots starting this week!
While Beorn and Sarah worked on Victor’s intro animation, Manu has been working on the final look of the shot (with two versions on the Cloud).
While Manu worked on Victor, Pablo has been focusing on lighting Franck. See a few additional renders in his weekly Cloud folder.
Now that the tornado looks mostly the way it is supposed to, Andy has started trying to figure out how exactly it needs to appear in the nine shots where it is featured. His solution will involve five different sims and plenty of data (he estimates 5 x 300 GB as a worst-case scenario). In the video below you’ll see four tests: Victor in front of the tornado (there are some missing frames and, don’t worry, that extranneous blue puff will be taken care of!), the tornado reaching down toward Franck (though the camera will ultimately pan down instead of up), and two versions of the trailer shot of Franck running from the tornado (the first had two many extra puffs, and next week’s version will include smaller, more detailed explosions).
Remember this awesome view of the tornado from below that we previewed last week? In Lukas’s folder you can find the node set-up Lukas created to help animate the swirling clouds.
Andy also painted up a quick concept of how he’s imagining the inside of the tornado. This is based on the point density vortex, mixed with a bit of color. Feel free to share your own suggestions!
Where oh where is all the memory going? Lukas breaks it down. (Click to enlarge.)
Awesome. The laundry tumbler/tornado/sky is looking extremely awesome. It is daunting enough to seem scary, powerful enough for a celestial being, but beautiful enough for hopeful transport.
The edit is seems well paced, starts slow, gives us some time to think, soak in the environment and what might be happening, and climactically builds. The lack of sound design is noticeable, at the beginning, but when that track hits, it’s definitely powerful. I the audio crafting at the front will help a lot. I am definitely starting to get the feels when I watch it. The WIP colour graded/composited/rendered shots are looking fantastic too, definitely starting to converge with the craft of everything and bring out some visually triggered emotions.
I might be sounding fan-boyish right now, but I really am digging how it is coming together. I can’t wait to see all the layers that will be built up as there are more passes to those unfinished animation shots, renders, vfx, and audio accompaniment. Sweet!
Well, thank you very much !! It’s very pleasing to hear and gives courage to continue the hard work :) thanks a lot !
Indeed, it looks truly awesome!
How’s the sound design going?
And will there also be some music before the tornado scene?
Maybe some accordion music over the hanging scene for a French touch? Or some barrel organ music for a Dutch touch? (just kidding, but if you make such a version just for fun you make my day! :) )
Hey J.
Well sound design is starting for the trailer, but until the animation is done it’s not very needed to have some foley artist or sound designer working on the movie… They work very closely with every part of the final frames, so the more advanced it is, the better they can work…
And for the music, there won’t be any music before the tornado. I don’t think that’s necessary and that “empowers” the tornado even more ! As for the joke side, I do think the first shot, with proper sound design and foley it should be very funny with Hjlati’s animation :)
Thank you very much for your kind word too, that makes us feel proud of what we do and give us courage to continue !
really looking up to watching and spreading the news…some of these stories, design and renders look awesome. i can certainly say i wish to be there watching and learning but also to get first hand at watching all that eye candy renders.
GoGo Gooseberry Team
I can see blender becoming more moviemakers choice for vfx. the tornado and cloud look awesome. Thanks Gooseberry team for making blender what it is today and keep up the good work.
We love you all
Loving that tornado!
In the nicest possible way I don’t want to see the sheepieeeees ass flying into the storm. He has a great face and i think you should show it off.
Can you have him fly bum first into the storm? It might just give it a little more space for entertainment value to really hang there on that shot and see the “oh #$%!” look on sheepieeees face before he get sucked up.
great work so far.