L'Issue / A Way Out - MoPA Graduation Film
Jules, a young man in his early 20s battles with his heroine addiction, while trying to ask for help he is thrown into his mind.
This is my thesis graduation film done while at MoPA. I was responsible for the Technical Direction, Pipeline Management, Production, Compositing as well as part of the CFX.
Because of its festival run, I cannot publicly share this film freely, but if you’d like to have a look at it contact me and I’ll love to see what can be aranged !
Here I will only go into details of the artistic process for the compositing and nuke tools I was responsible for, but you can find the pipeline setup and more tool setups on the “Tools” tab of this website.
Beware that this will spoil most of the film to you, so proceed with caution ^^ !
A big thanks to the rest of my team : Jeanne-Rose GOMBERT-PFISTER, Sydney ANDJEL, Mélina LIN, Pauline PETIT, Noémie PETTE and Arthur PIRO.
Software used: Houdini, Renderman, Nuke, After Effects, Deadline, Prism, Shotgrid, Python.
Breakdown : Compositing
An array of tools and effects were used and created to get to our key style. While being heavily inspired with the traditionnal oil painting and colors of Rothko, Kenneth Bloom and Rae Klein, and media such as Arcane and Le Bruit du Silence, it was important for us to develop our own artistic voice and style. Compositing was taking in all this insipiration, meeting it with the concept art and see how far we could take it from there !
The bathroom :
The main challenge in compositing the bathroom was getting the style right and consistent. As a large part of the art direction style is done through compositing and there were two of us working on it, consistency was key.
Softening the image, adding touches of blue, adding brushstrokes textures and distortion were all part of making the bathroom reflect Jules’ emotions and distress in this sequence.
This is also where towards the end the warm light linked to “the voice” is introduced. As it is linked to a character it was important for us to make it fit with the already painterly environment and just as important was to make it feel alive.
The family dinner :
In the family dinner sequence, a large portion of the shots are 2D, and those that are not are a blend of CGI and 2D.
The 2D shot and elements are all hand drawn, frame by frame, from real-life references we shot and then painted over. The challenge here was to make Jules (the only CGI element in this) fit with it all, both stylistically and color-wise.
We started from the stylistic base we had created with the bathroom sequence, and applied new effects such as brush textures, AO and outlines.
The mental palace :
In this 3rd act of the film, Jules is deeply lost, trying to find his way in a labyrinth of mirrors that forces him to face himself.
The colors and style is remeniscent of the bathroom while gradually getting softer in both aspects. The reflections here act to emphasize the staging and emotions of Jules. Intergrating them was a challenge at times as extra cg renders had to be done, and they sometimes had to be integrated and fixed using the 3D interface of Nuke to match with Jules’ movements.
Here on top of adding and integrating the reflections, the environment of the mental palace was worked on a lot. Relighting with normals enabled us to better set the environment, while keeping Jules the center focus of the shots.
The end :
In the end, Jules get out of his head, out of the bathroom and into the arms of the voice, ready to accept help.
Those final shots come in contrast to the early shots of the bathroom, with a softer light, more color variety and shift in warmth to highlight the evolution Jules has been through along with the message of hope.
Breakdown : Nuke Gizmos
Here are a few gizmos I created in Nuke during this project, both for artistic and technical/pipeline reasons. Some of them use python scripting integrated in the gizmo to achieve the desired effect. As mentionned above, more tools (that were created in Houdini) are available for exemple on the “Tools” tab of this website !
Brush Light Effect :
This gizmo was created in order the give the light of the voice its signature style. It uses part of Sydney Andjel’s triplanar node for its effect. You can plug in different textures for different results and control the strength of the brushes.
Automated Beauty of Lights/LPEs :
This gizmo was created in order the gain time when setting up the compositing scenes in order to spend the most time on the artistic elements. It uses Python script to detect the LPE AOVs with name formatting and creates the subsequent proper nodes and parameters to recreate the beauty of the image.
Autoloading of Files :
This gizmo was created in order the gain time when setting up the compositing scenes in order to spend the most time on the artistic elements. It uses Python script to detect the latest render of every single pass of the sequence and shot you are currently in and creates the subsequent proper read nodes and parameters. You can also update the read files with a new detected version of the pass and switch between the noisy and denoised version (if it is available).
Best Of Images :
