The Path Of The Explorers
In this corporate short film, a young girl jumps into the unknown to discover uncharted territories.
I was asked to write and direct this film for the Elithis company. I had 2 months and a half to do everything on my own, from modeling to final render.
Of course, I bought some assets along the way, especially a lot of quixel megascans. A sound designer made all the sound work, including the music.
This was done in cinema 4D, rendered with Arnold.
After the client gave his go on the scenario, I drew a simple yet understandable storyboard to know where I was heading and what I needed to create exactly. The final film is faithful at 99% to this original storyboard. Below you can see the storyboard for the first shots.
The biggest challenge here was to have a relatable main character. I knew I did not have the skill, the time and the experience to have 2 characters on screen in such a short amount of time, that's why I wrote the script to have a man speaking as a voice over only.
So now I just had one character to concentrate my efforts upon. I drew a few iterations of the young girl then I started modeling her directly inside C4D : I made a very rough sculpt and I made the details while doing the retopo work.
Then I simulated the clothes in Marvelous Designer, retopoed them in Maya (much faster than C4D), and UV unfolded everything before texturing in Substance.
The hard part at this stage was the hair : C4D is not very good at handling hair simulations, which is why I went for a ponytail look in the first place (easier to deal with at animation). Plus I didn't find much ressources to learn grooming so I had to experience a bit to find the right workflow.
Here is a poster I was commissioned to do for the film. Grass and rocks are megascans assets. The towers are separated renders composited back into the image in after effects.
A big part of the film were the environments. I spent quite some time working on them, and the versions you can see in the film are quite far from my previous tries. As I was alone, I went for a mix of hand modeling and procedural modeling (20-80) in order to be able to iterate as fast as possible.
Below, you can see my first try at the "sea tower" scenery, versus the one that made it to the final video. I needed to have a transition between the sea and the land and didn't want to have a simple cut from one to another, so I wanted to show a shoreline.
My first attempt, which is very bad, was fully procedural. So I decided to work a bit myself to have a better result in the end, blending modeling, procedural modeling, and megascans.
I made a short tutorial video about making the last wide environment of the film. Watch it below.
Hope you liked this project, I put a lot tof time and passion into it ! Cheers :)