Sole Isolitary & Moonboy

My contribution to both the projects in the second half of it’s pre production has been consistent. Although I did spend a large portion of my time working on the creation of the assets for Sole Isolitary, I did do my best to make sure that I took part in the priortizing assets for Moonboy.

Sole Isolitary is the story of Jess, a teenage girl, stuck in an empty world. As she roams around trying to pass time out of boredom, she sees clothes lying on the floor of the streets. In her boredom, she built up a routine. She would shoot up a red flare onto the sky hoping that someone would reach out to her. She walks around the streets trying to set up a movie projector at an old basketball court to kill time. Wanting to deal with the anger built up inside of her from her broken relationship with her mother, she confronts it firsthand. She uses the last voicemail message her mother left her to deal with her issues in her own unique way.

Moonboy was a once lively comet that crashed on the moon. He wants to escape but the problem is the moons gravity and debris stuck to his body are keeping him grounded. With the newfound motivation of the comets he’s trying his best to get their attention but all they want to do is play amongst the stars. Will he ever be able to fly again? Can he get the comets attention before they move on to the next galaxy. Or will he be destined to stay on the moon forever?

During the second half of the pre-production stage, the Sole team came to a conclusion that because of the numerous assets present in a given scene, we decided to use ready made textures by Quixel. Quixel is a website that provides ready made textures with a touch of ultrarealism in them. The benefit of working through Quixel is that it allows the custom modifications for the user to experiment with. This was good news because this meant that the team as whole could focus on creating high quality models needed for the film. So, models were made.

The above models are assets that I had created for the film. These are modular assets that will be used repetedly all throughout the film. In other words, one of these assets will be shown numerous times in a single scene. For example, one of the scenes in the film includes a mother-daughter argument occuring at a diner. The diner consists of similar looking diner booths. However, in real-life, because no matter how similar two objects look like, the flaws between the two objects distinguishes one from another. These are not explicit observations that human beings do but as a te-chincal artist, these are informations that one needs to keep in mind. To achieve such an effect, one asset will be multiplied numerous times and the textures that will be applied to such assets will be varied slightly or even significantly. This will create a believable illusion to the human eye.

Previs (Sole Isolitary)

After the team as a whole were done making models and needed for the animation, it was time for a rough draft of the animation to be made, just to see if the acting and the cinematography of the film as a whole will portray and tell the story the way it’s needed to. Traditionally, block animation is done to create rough movements in the previsualisation step of the process. However, understanding that the pre-vis is just a draft process, we decided to use motion capture to capture the movements of the rigged and modelled character. The below video is my contribution for the previs of Shots 5 to 13.

Modelling (Moonboy)

As for Moonboy, I had the task of creating a moon model that the char-acter was going to reside in. Becuase of the confirmed camera shots, it had been decided that only the front face of the moon had to modelled perfectly because the other sides of the moon weren’t going to be shown on screen. As for the star and the cylindrical asset, they were just made to be placed in the backgrounds of the scenes making them a tertiary asset that didn’t require much attention to detail.