CG Record and RebusFarm has announced that Pause 2017 Opening Titles has won CGRecord | RebusFarm Reel of the Month #7 Award. The film is all CGi made in Cinema 4D with Octane Render, and the idea came from an anime called "Digimon Adventure", then focus on a different angle of empty cities to express a feeling of isolation, despite the fact we live in these spaces.
1. Please can you tell us about the concept idea for the title, and the team behind it...Why the "Cat"??
First of all, I had 4 totally different concepts in the beginning. I discussed them with my friends, Somei and Yan Liang, then I finally selected the “City” option because it was more executable for me. This “City” idea was inspired by my childhood Anime called “Digimon Adventure”, which is a story of a group of kids with their digital monsters fighting against dark forces. The most inspiring part to me is its opening film which uses Ravel’s Bolero and shows a different angle of a night city combined with digital elements. This opening film is from 20 years ago and it's really hard to find now, but the music still reminds me of that masterpiece.
At the initial stage, there was no cat involved as I only envisioned an empty city with digital elements; I thought that would generate a sense of loneliness, but after I built several shots, I came across an amazing indie game called “HK”, in which there's a cat walking along the street of future Kowloon city, and that was when the cat idea came up. I was astonished by this game−especially the cat− and then I thought it was a brilliant idea to use the cat! Fortunately, I have 2 cats at home, and since I needed a character or little spirit to guide us through all the shots, I decide to bring one of my cats into the film, and this became the essential part of the whole opening title.
Game poster from indie game HK (https://hk-devblog.com/)
All the ideas were borrowed from these masterminds, I just combined them into a film.
2. What are the softwares/plugins you used? Please share some workflow.
For the 3D: Cinema 4D with Octane render and a little X-particles for grass growing effect.
For editing and post production: Premier for editing works and a few color corrections in After Effects.
Basically, the workflow is pretty simple. I modeled and rendered in Cinema 4D, animated the shots, and outputted the hardware mode to render, then I took the scene to Premier for editing, and finally outputted the beauty pass to After Effects for some color corrections. But if the time is limited, I try to use multipasses to save time on the project.
3. Could you please share with us some of your processes in making the title. Which part do you like the most?
I love the render part mostly because I can see the final visual result!
This is the behind the scenes video:
Also, about the first shot of the video, people were asking me if it was a 3D or AfterEffects. Answer: This was rendered inside Cinema4D. I have a computer model and this is what the screen looks like.
These broken pieces of glass enhance the details of the screen, and in close shot, this would be more obvious.
4. We love the lighting and the atmosphere. Could you please talk more about it?
Thank you, I think I was influenced by my childhood games and films which apparently resulted to my visual style. These giants such as Halo, MassEffect, Alien, BladeRunner, Ghost in the shell and Terminator, influenced me so much when I was young, and this aroused my love for glowing and dark moods. Also, my mum was a super-talented programmer, and from my very young age, I watched her as she used Apple II for programming; I saw her do so many computer stuff and that really inspired me to become a big fan of the computer and digital culture.
5.How did you work with an audio team to make the great sound for the title?
The music and sound aspects are also very important. Echoic Audio is a very gentle and professional company, and they reached out to me at the beginning of the project. We discussed a lot from BladeRunner-to-Moon in a bid to find the right references and style we needed, then we looked at several temp tracks for work editing, and all these brainstorming contributed to the final amazing soundtrack! You can check their site for more amazing works: echoicaudio.com
6.If you were to share a tip for the motion graphic artists out there, what would it be?
I don't think I have concrete tips to share, as I’m also young in the industry, and don’t have a lot of commercial experiences. However, there are some basic points that are very important irrespective of the industry you are in, and they are; to keep learning, keep questioning and to keep following your beloved things.
Thanks Zaoeyo for the inspiring work and nice interview!
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.
co-Sponsor Real Displacement texture
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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