What is “Project I-M” and who are Team “CRAFT”?
“Project I-M” is a project created by Saxion students supported by the Dutch branch of the Thales Group company located in Hengelo. The purpose is to create a short production film, featuring a photo realistic friendly robot, on a journey from the Thales factory across the Netherlands. The robot is actually the latest radar for naval security being produced by Thales. As an end goal the robot has to reach his designated ship and transform into the radar which will be the eyes and ears of the ship. The robot is a mascot, which purpose is to attract young engineers to search for a career within Thales.
Team “CRAFT” (Cool Robot Animation For Thales) is a team made up from 2 teachers and 9 students.
Entering VFX
During the last two years our teams has been working on a short visual effects movie called Project I-M. We as students had no prior visual effects experience when we started making this movie. Almost everything you see in the movie is done by the students. Camera, audio, visual effects, compositing, editing and grading has all been done by the students. For most of us this has been the starting point in everyones career in VFX.
Camera work
When the team started this movie a lot of camera work had to be done. After the synopsis they started location scouting through The Netherlands and planned several days of filming. For some shots helicopter flight was used too!
An important aspect of filming is that you have a lens distortion of the camera. This is later used in compositing to actually bend the computer generated image to footage to match the lens distortion.
Audio
Most people watch a movie and undervalue the importance of audio. One of our colleagues actually said that 51% is audio and 49% are visuals, after creating this movie and as a visual effects artist I can tell you that this is true.
You can hear that all sounds from the robot are various sounds layered into each other. For each shot our audio engineer had to add all backgound noises. City sounds, robot sounds, birds, wind and all that sort of sounds where added later to fully control every aspect of the film.
Building the robot
During the project two members of our team designed and fully modeled and textured the robot within one summer vacation (talk about dedication). Most of the modeling was done in Max and later transfered to Maya. Texturing was done in DDO.
Rigging and animation
After the robot was finished the two team members created a rig in Maya to control the robot. After rigging was done they could make the robot do anything they want.
Rendering
All scenes in the movie where rendered with V-Ray and some shots include Mantra. Our lighting artist spent many hours getting that realistic lighting to relieve the compositors work.
Compositing
Our compositor made great breakdowns during the project. I think this breakdown will give you a great overview of how a shot is created. From camera plate to a animated and rendered robot to final compositing and color grading.
3D print
During the project we also thought it would be a cool idea to get a 3d print of the model. This one is about 50cm in height. Also a 6 cm version will be created soon!
The making of Project I-M (dutch)
Results
So what did we get from creating this movie? For everyone the first thing is a great portfolio item. In the visual effects world it is important to have a good showreel. In those 1.5 minutes you show nothing but your best work. Thanks to this project all of us could fill our portfolio with the best shots.
A great premiere was organized by Thales and Saxion, from this premiere we got a little attention across The Netherlands. Metro and more local news papers wrote a short piece on our movie.
In the end we all contirbuted to a really great movie that we are all proud of. Not only the students but also our teachers experienced a exponential learning curve during this project. For me I will always see this movie as the start of my career in VFX.
For those wanting to get more in depth knowlegde, we kept track of all progress made at http://craft-thales.tumblr.com/. It gets technical really fast.