Wyrd is a 3D animated short film produced as final assignment for the Animation and Digital Arts graduation from 2014 to 2015. The initial team was composed by me, Hud Duque and João Pedro. We were latter joined by Pedro Santos. We had 3 semesters to make it, and the first one was dedicated to the story, concepts and storyboard.
Concept and Early Designs
The first draft of the film tells a story of a viking raiding party drifting at the sea. Conflicts emerge between the crew, who face starvation, hopelessness and death.
Now we had to have Vikings. The whole team engaged in designing members for the crew. Resorting to the good old pencils and paper, these are some of my crontibutions from the early design phase.
The initial idea was making the movie in stop-motion with characters in 2D Tradigital Animation. After testing the technique in Armas e Bigodes, we decided it was not what we were looking for, and took the risk of making it in 3D, wich i wished to learn more and practice.
3D Production
After style and technique research, i began digital sculpting. It was my first contact with the process, and it took a few discarded models until i got the hang of it. After sculpting, i retopologised, rigged, and UV-mapped each character. Hud modeled the boat and props, Pedro painted the textures while João animated.
The textures for these renders below were painted by me after production for practice purposes.
The textures for these renders below were painted by me after production for practice purposes.
Effects and Rendering
Most of the film was set in a boat, and we still did not have a sea. I did some testing and got to some pretty exciting results, but due to rendering limitations we had to settle with a simpler version.
Being in the middle of the ocean, our vikings had to endure a lot of weather hazards. In the making of this climate variety, i had the opportunity to learn about various advanced tools in Blender wich helped me do the light and the ambience. The opening sequence was also very challenging, with the underwater view of the boat, after a coin sinks into the dark belows.
After the render it was the time for the final edit, wich i did in Adobe Premiere.
