FEATURE
Big VFX on a budget
its originator, Izzy Burton.
You might think that only being
able to focus on a project during
unpredictable, fragmented
moments would prove frustrating.
But, says Burton, it was actually
helpful to the creative process.
“The short took 18 months
to complete,” she recalls. “And
the benefit of this stretched-out
timeline meant that I could leave
it – sometimes for a few weeks –
and come back to it with fresh eyes
and more advice from colleagues
and friends, meaning the story and
visuals had time to become the best
they could be.”
Initially VIA had been planned
as a one-woman-show project,
but as the story became more
elaborate and even more characters
continued to be added, Blue Zoo
brought in a team of 3D artists –
Chris Rais, Pietro Licini, Anthony
Delliste, Dane Winn and PhilBrooks – along with producer
Tom Box and production manager
Chantal Baldwin.
Says Box: “One of the main ways
we achieved such a high-quality
project with such a small team was
to embrace the restrictions and
see how we could use them as a
challenge to how they restricted
the storytelling process. This
resulted in using very small
3D characters to limit the 2D
animation detail required, and
forced the storytelling to use the
environments instead of relying so
much on character performance.”“WE jusT Took ThE TimE To
Do iT R ighT”
While “embrace the restrictions”
is a great mantra for a personal
project, there’s one area where you
may find yourself refreshingly free
of restrictions. Unless you have a
contest to enter, you could decidenot to set a deadline – leaving you
free to finesse and perfect your
work in a way that just wouldn’t
be possible when working on a
commercial production.
And that’s exactly what VFX
artist Julien Vanhoenacker found
when creating A Drop (vimeo.
com/155347431), a spectacular
seven-minute short with shades of
Inception, about a man plunging
off a tall building into an unknown
sci-fi world.
Vanhoenacker started the
project as a way of developing
his skills as a director, and found
the lack of ticking clock hugely
liberating. “Most of my projects are
TV scenes with tight deadlines,”
he explains. “Here, though, we
just said: let’s shoot it, then let’s
post-process it, and it’s done when
it’s done. So that’s how we achieved
something that I think looks pretty
good, with a small amount of
people – because we just took the
time to do it right.”
The film was shot in Bangkok,
partly in a gym and partly in an
abandoned building: you’ll be
astonished by what Vanhoenacker
has created for so little money.
That’s largely due to most peopleone of the biggest
challenges on ViA
was integrating the
3D characters with
the painterly 2D
environments
“the story and visuals had time to
become the best they could be”
Izzy Burton, concept artist & art director, Blue Zoo Animation