Homework

Basilisk Uses CINEMA 4D to Produce Animation and Visual Effects for the Short Film, "Homework".

"While visiting a museum, a father tells his children stories to try and make their homework more interesting. Things get out of hand and they find themselves in a fantasy world of flying Vikings, purple monkeys and sea snakes. His daughter Kate, who misses her deceased mother, finds herself in a very mysterious inner world where she thinks she sees a familiar face."

To give the film a distinctive look, all the elements for the imaginary sequences were modeled in CINEMA 4D. The aim was not photorealism, but more imaginary realism, bringing to life elements from children's books and objects in the museum.

CINEMA 4D's procedural noise shaders were invaluable for creating dramatic, stylized stormy skies and seas, as well as electrical glowing effects. Sea waves were animated with Sub-Polygon Displacement. CINEMA's animation tools provided quick and easy ways of bringing models to life, including a hoard of monkeys swinging on ropes, animated carved Viking figures and a huge, terrifying, rusted metal sea snake. BodyPaint 3D was used for texturing, and the coils of the sea snake's body were animated with Renato Tarabella's clever Path Deformer plug-in. In this mysterious inner world, strange webs and blobs of plasma were created with particle systems and metaballs, and textured with Advanced Render's SubSurfaceScattering feature.

As most of the sequence involved combining greenscreened footage of the cast with the 3D elements, it was decided to render elements separately in CINEMA 4D and reassemble them as 3D layers in After Effects. CINEMA's fast renderer allowed for rapid production of the elements at different scales and angles, which could then be tried out in different configurations with the live action footage to arrive at the desired result.

The greenscreen footage was shot in a single day on HD video with the actors floating, dangling and pulling strange expressions. In a shot where Katie is grabbed by the metal sea snake, the actor was filmed lying across a stool. The keyed footage was applied as a texture to a plane positioned to make it appear as if Katie were in the snake's mouth.

"Basilisk found that CINEMA 4D provided an excellent set of tools to complete the project on time and cost-effectively, with flexible, reliable, stable and efficient performance."

The film was successfully shown at the following festivals in 2005:
Uppsala International Film Festival, Sweden
CAN Leicester Film Festival
Sefton Children's Film Festival, Liverpool
Seagate Foyle, Derry, Ireland
High Falls Film Festival, USA
Cinecity, Brighton

Animation and Visual Effects by Basilisk
The film was directed by Zara Waldeback and produced by Lynette Norris as a Digital Short for Screen South.

Basilisk is a small motion graphics, animation and visual effects company based in Oxford, directed by James Newman and Elizabeth Moriarty.

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