Alex Strangelove
// Client Work // Netflix
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Had the extreme pleasure of working on this Netflix Original with the crew at Hey Beautiful Jerk. "Delicious worms" and a pissed off toad breaking through a skull in the hands of the ballsy kid that licked him (Del) - these were the hallucinations I helped bring to life in this funny and charming coming of age story set in the modern LGBTQ, polyamorous, #MeToo world. The speaking worms and crackling skull presented some tricky rigging challenges that I spent the better part of 3 months figuring out. This project gave me a chance to dabble in character design and rigging and presented unique challenges that I really enjoyed solving.
// Process
Gummy Worm Look Dev
I had to spend some serious time with real life gummy worms and notice every detail to bring that realism to the 3D version of them. The first round came off looking a too happy looking and the director wanted to get them to seem a bit more maniacal. I achieved this by setting their eyes further apart and lessoning their smiles. The shift from closed to open mouth was achieved with Pose Morphs in Cinema 4D and a ton of hand sculpting. I tried using dynamics to pile them into the container at first, but in the end, I had to hand place each worm to match the real life plate in the shot prior to them coming to life and speaking to Del. I then spent some time getting them to reflect and refract light as they would in the real world.
// Process
Skull to Toad R&D
The toad scene presented several technical challenges that we solved one at a time. The shader for the toad itself was quite complex. Thankfully, 3rd party renderers, Octane in this case, could handle it and made lighting and setup fairly straightforward. We used an HDRI shot on set to get the lighting right since there were several LEDs and blacklights in the room this shot happened in. Octane made it easy to line things up realtime based on that HDRI.
// Process
Behind the Scenes
A look at the 3d setup for the TRP Backpacks and Wormhole R&D that I created in Cinema 4D, Redshift, Cycles, and X-Particles. Much of the wormhole development wasn't used in the final but it laid some solid ground work down for where to take the end look and was a super enjoyable and nerdy exploration on my part. Who doesn't want to make 3D Wormholes all day?
