An ~8 min shortfilm project directed and produced by the director Miko Lazic. I was brought in at first as a creature artist & animator / generalist but as time passed by and as my resourses for Dark Haven grew I stepped in the role of VFX/CG production supervisor. Not only taking care of all living things in the film in terms of modeling & animation, I also came up with a pipeline all the way through post production. With that I also created most of the smoke/fluid simulations as well as taking care of / mentoring all the interns. 

The big establishing shot flying over the forest with lots of animals runing away from what's to come, the cold mist. This shot was the first we started working on and the absolutetly last we finished. Huge challenge getting this done. All the trees and environment created by Emil Besirevic which also did a lot of the compositing. I created an animation loop for multiple animals that then got linked to a crowd simulator. Even though we finaly got this done, there were a couple of things that got missed out due to time pressure. Would love plant footprints, snow splashing up from the feet ect. But it was just not possible with our deadline.

2 animals in this film were seen in closeup and we used fur for them. For the wolf it was straight forward. But for the moose which was the Hero in the movie I built 3 different fur simulations on it. one for when you see the whole moose, one for when the head is in closeup. We had 1 shot with an extreme closeup of his eye and there was a 3rd simulation on it to be able to add enough detail needed. 

One of the biggest challenges we had was all the fluid work. The antagonist is the cold smokey mist that freezes everything it touches. Most of the scenes it appears on it it takes over the entire environment. 

In the process of making all the CG shots I realized we were never going to be able to finish the film going the traditional way in terms of rendering. I figured out a way we could get passed hours of render time per frame. Since realism was not prioritized since the director wanted the film to feel fictional and fantastic seing the world from the childrens point of view. I developed a way to do most of the shots in 3D composite. We rendered out material that had been built for traditional rendering and used it as textures to out on planes inside our composite software. 

I was also on set during the whole shoot as a onset supervisor. Making sure we make it as easy as possible for the material to work in post. We spent long days of shooting out in the cold. Even though I'm not a big fan of cold climate, this was a great experience.

A huge project for the amount of people involved but with the help of resources from Dark Haven studios (my production company) we managed to push this project to a final. A Big project that finaly got finished 2013 and are shown in festivals throughout 2014.