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At the end of 21st century, mankind were facing global resource depletion. Space Rovers were sent out to find potential inhabitable planetsAnd We have a quick interview with Producer | Director: Shawn Wang
Hi Shawn! Please give us an overview of The film from the Idea to the way to make it to the screen
Planet Unknown is a passion project as well as my graduation thesis film. The core idea was to tell a story with all the 3D skills I had learned and kept learning new stuff along the process.
The biggest inspiration were Interstellar’s two robots Tars and Case. There was one shot that Tars saying hello to Case which brought me a lot of imagination of friendship between robots. The idea of pair of robot friends exploring space started developing from there.
Other inspirations include movies like Wall-E, Toy Story, CHAPPiE. They were all perfect examples to analyze. And NASA documentaries about Mars Rover Curiosity, and short films by individuals like Alex Roman’s The Third & The Seventh, Richard Mans’ Abiogenesis, Erik Wernquist’s Wanderers, Alf Lovvold’s Dawn of the Stuff, and so many more.
The story development was quite challenging. The idea was born back in 2014 but the first version of the script didn’t come out until July 2015. I made a very rough previs in the very beginning. Then it took me around 4 months to build the 3D assets. There was also some changes of story which cost me more time to remodel new assets. Then I moved on to animatic previews. Each individual shot got more clear and problems to solve became more specific. I tried to complete one shot everyday including animation, scene assembly and FX, then left it rendering while sleeping. So next day when I woke up, I could do the compositing with the renders and moved on to the next shot.
The picture-lock version was then handed to Echoic Audio for music and sound. We wrapped up on June 1st and the short film premiered 9 days later at Communication University of China to an audience of more 2,000 from all over the city.
What is the most challenge for the Sci-fi film you think?
I think story is always the biggest challenge. Audience always expect something new and original. That includes both amazing visual effects and good story. Visual stimulation in sci-fi is quite common nowadays, but it’s always the story that sell the movie. There are lots of good examples of how visual effects serve the story in a perfect way. And bad examples of amazing VFX driven film without a soul.
It took me several years to slowly understand how important storytelling is. Because storytelling is so powerful, it is also essential in video games, music videos and even commercials nowadays. And it is actually pretty hard to write and tell an interesting story. It’s a combination of imagination, logic and most important of all, personal experience and feelings from our life. Sci-fi is a genre that allows us to bring new concepts and ideas which can be completely impossible in real life. Filmmakers has to set their own rules which should make sense to the audience in their newly built world. What I believe is, after all, it’s all about humanity. No matter it’s a world of robots, spaceman, cyberpunk and something else.
Please tell a bit about how Echoic Audio help you on the sound. How both team can discuss and catch the idea
Echoic Audio is one of the UK’s leading music & sound design studios. I was really excited to have this collaboration with them. Their epic cinematic score and detailed sound design for the film lifted it to a new level that I had never imagined.
I approached them with the a preview version with my reference music. They are way more experienced in music and sound than I do and I really liked lots of ideas and concepts on the music and sound part they suggested.
Three months was a really short time for huge amount of work on music and sound for this film. Echoic created the original score and sound design which were more towards dark and sophisticated and really made the film more energetic and intense. They also did the 5.1 sound mix which sounded quite epic while screening in cinemas. I was so excited when I heard the score and sound for the first time. Because for more than 10 months I was limited to my temp music. I felt like watching a completely different film.
Could you please share some breakdown. The interesting technique, the plugin, and software that you used
About the tools: Cinema 4D, plug-in TurbulenceFD and Octane for C4D were heavily used for most of the tasks. Houdini was used to fracture rocks, World Machine for terrain generation. Then Zbrush for sculpting, Mari for texturing, After Effects for compositing, and Premiere for editing. Python and JavaScript were used for scripting in C4D, Mari and AE, which helped speed up the process a lot. I used a single PC with i7-5930k and 2 x Nvidia GTX980 for all the rendering.
Below are some Breakdown of the workflow to make the film:
The developed tool using for the film - After Effects Tool FX ToolBox v1.0
Do you have any cool coming project for the near future. Next chapter of Planet Unknown maybe?
I think it’s hard to keep expanding the Planet Unknown World. I’ll move on to new ideas and building something entirely new. Planet Unknown took me almost 1 year and a half from inspiration to final film. Next one will probably cost me a few years. But I’m excited about the new adventure. Thank you!
Thank you Shawn!
Official Website: PlanetUnknownFilm.com
Facebook Page: facebook.com/PlanetUnknownFilm
IMDb: imdb.com/title/tt5850826
Echoic Audio: echoicaudio.com
Credits:
Written & Directed by - Shawn Wang
Modelling, Texturing, Animation, Compositing & Editing - Shawn Wang
Music & Sound Design by - Echoic Audio
Composer - Sam Foster
Sound Design by - Tom Gilbert & David Johnston
Special Thanks to - Evolutions
Re-recording Mixer - Will Norie
Faculty Producer - Xinyuan Huang
Faculty Adviser - Yucheng Huang
Special Thanks to System Advisers - Horizon Bian / Sicong Wang / Jiawei Cao
Festivals:
01. Burbank International Film Festival - Best Animated Short
02. Korea Independent Animation Festival - Official Selection
03. Imaginaria Film Festival - Official Selection
04. LA Shorts Fest - Official Selection
05. Oaxaca Film Festival - Official Selection
06, Los Angeles CineFest - Official Selection
07. Lisbon International Film Festival - Official Selection
08. China Animation & Comic Competition Golden Dragon Award - Official Selection
About Reel of the Month Sponsors
Main Sponsor: Rebus Render Farm
The Sponsor for Reel of the Month - Rebus Farm is leading render farm service which instantly provides you with 3,000 XEON CPUs to render your animations and still-images. Start your Rebus Render Farm trial for free. Just create a new account and use your starting account balance of 10 Renderpoints, worth 11.02 USD. After downloading the Farminizer Software, you can immediately start working with the Rebus Render Farm. Winning Reel of the Month means you will get 350 Render Points from Rebus Render Farm.
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The Real Displacement texture are produced by using highly detailed 3d-scans to get accurate color and depth informations from a real location with polycounts up to 20.000.000 and native scan-resolutions over 16k. Using a image-based-lightcancelling-process to reduce the light and shadows in the diffuse-map. All maps are provided with layers for glossyness, roughness, ambient occlusion and more, so it's prepared for physical rendering. Most maps are leveled to set it to 100% and it fits - so you save time setting up a material. Normal-maps is provided as a alternative to the displacement, or to support it. With these textures you can reconstruct the original surface incl. the geometry with a minimum of resources and a maximum of speed and flexiblity. Winning Reel of the Month means you will get 03 Free Collection of Real Displacement texture.
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