"Learn to speak film". That statement marked the beginning of this campaign film we created at Motoko for Filmhub Zuid-Holland. A project where children watch, create, and experience film in all its forms. We chose a form in which children become part of an animated film world, work with film props that come to life, and transform into animated film characters themselves.
Look Development
We aimed for a style that is playful, colorful, and imaginative, yet still fits within the physical world. In practice, this meant using 3D objects with a drawn look and feel, which we could integrate with actual filmed footage of children. Before starting the film shoots and modeling the 3D objects, we did many tests - both in 3D and with test footage of ourselves. A lot of experimentation was involved in finding the final style.
To give more depth to the 3D objects without using realistic shadows, we wanted to do something with hatch shading. So we developed a custom hatch shader in Cinema 4D, which, combined with the Sketch & Toon line style, would produce an illustrated look.
Hatch textures: 2 tests with different line thickness. Eventually we went for the thick lines.
Then we applied displacers, noise, and wiggle effects to all the 3D objects and line styles to create a funky wiggly image, in combination with the graphic appearance of the 3D elements and the use of color.
The hatch texture applied to a few test objects.
Tracking the filmed shots, placing and animating the 3D objects, masking, and compositing all the elements together was quite a process that we had to streamline. Fortunately, we were able to work very precisely, and not a single shot was lost thanks to the storyboard and animatic we created in advance.
From raw footage to final shot: the several stages of creating the animated camera and elements.
The iron giant: #wip of how we rigged and animated this character.