Element Animation: What’s In My Big Sack
Client: Element Animation
Role: Lighting, Compositing, Rigging, and Pipeline TD
Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNeW3BbZc9Q
What’s In My Big Sack is a comedic animated music video based on the video game Minecraft, where Santa isn’t a good guy giving people presents, but is instead kidnapping people.
At the start of the project I worked together with Joel Houghton, the art director at Element Animation, to come up with the visual style for the video. We wanted it to look like a typical animated Christmas film, like the Christmas scene in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Lots of blues and purples. Originally, the video would be partially during the day, but in the end we decided to have everything be at night. It’s all a single large set, so we started of by creating a base lighting setup for the set that could be reused in every shot. This allows Joel and I to speed up the lighting for all of the shots.
In order to achieve the look that we wanted, I created a few tool for use in compositing. A big part in the look of Element Animation videos are the specular highlights on the sides of characters. Originally, we were creating them in-render by placing lights that followed the characters. However, this often didn’t give us the control that we wanted and could also produce unwanted specular highlights that we then had to get rid of during compositing. Instead, I created a tool for in Fusion (the compositor that we use) that would generate the specular highlights based on AOVs that were rendered out with the footage. This offered us much more control to get the exact highlights that we wanted.
For the sake of render times, we weren’t rendering out the sky or environment fog. These were added in during compositing. In previous productions, we were exporting out the camera and actually rendering out a sphere for the sky and using the built in 3D fog effect in Fusion. However, this didn’t always give us the control that we wanted and also slowed down Fusion by quite a bit. The second tool that I created would take in an HDRI for the sky and an HDRI for the fog colour. It could then render out the sky and the environment fog, with the control that we needed to achieve the look that we wanted. It could also take in a map of the clouds which it would then render as well.
For the snow, we had the idea to make it sparkle. I ended up creating a tool that would add in a noise that was fixed to the snow geometry in Fusion. That noise could then be thresholded to create the sparkles. It actually generated the sparkles for the entire image, but we used a cryptomatte to make it only show up on the snow.
Lastly, to help us be able to composite all of the shots, I created a templated auto-comper. We can specify the footage and it would set up everything so that we can just get right into manipulating the image. It’s templated so that we can easily use it on other projects that require different looks.
