Friday, 16 May 2014

FMX: Creating The Unifverse for Thor: The Dark World

The talk was by Alex Wuttke, from Double Negative
I've been to talks by Double Negative before and I am a big fan of their work!
Once again they showed that they're amazing at what they do. Here they went into a huge amount of detail, told us about their inspirations and processes. I find these talks really helpful because then I have a good idea of how to get around to my projects.

They worked on around 900 shots from the movie.
Asgard - Dungeons, Throne Room, World Assets,
Harrow Ship Interiors
Svartalfheim
Greenwich
They work through the usual routine, from the concepts through tests to finished work. But admit that as you work on it, you change a lot of things, it's roughly similar to the original concept but most of the time not the same. Because when you see the whole thing and how things behave etc you need to change a thing or two. Which is a bit of a reassurance to me because my finals never look like I originally planned!

They talked about mechanics, and figuring out how things would behave in real life makes things easier!

Nailing things down early is also very important so there isn't much experimenting going on during production.

We got shown in detail, how they've made the throne room crash! And it looked absolutely amazing, mostly done in houdini. I love seeing countless amounts of layers just coming together into this one beautiful image.

As of Asgard itself it was a very interesting process.
Asgard is pretty much just Norway. They found a beautiful place there, took a helicopter out for out five and a half hours to get as much footage as possible!
Skinny shutter - eliminates motion blur! Makes it easy to pin down an image and use it.

If you're creating a world, always reference!!! Creating a world with no constraints makes it difficult.

Town planning:
Palace is a main thing, it's what all the main roads come to. I's the biggest thing seen from everywhere, makes it easy to navigate.
Once you've got the overall look, explore the individual buildings.
Consider shapes of things - so they're recognized when you see their silhouettes.

Waterfalls were shot in Iceland.

Overall they've created 12 x 10 km's of cg Asgard.

They've used Nuke for Harrow Ship Interiors.

Svartalfheim was again shot in Iceland.
Used a lot of negative lens flares.
Everything is based on photos.
Gives you freedom of camera etc. but still keeps the realism.

Greenwich, water simulations - huge deal!


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