"SMALL SOLDIERS War For the Nekron" Proof of Concept Making Of
From Story Board to final picture. We tried to be loyal to our storyboard, which meant tricking the placement of a lot of things. We didn't have vfx budget so the plastics were keyframe animated by Xabier, using a mix of bones and blendshapes.
The first shot was actually one of the last ones to do. I recorded myself in the garage, under a similar light. I remember the team and I were awake at 2am testing if the defocus would work as planed, it was a joyful moment when it did.
The short film was rendered in Lumen, not Pathtracing, so we had some limitation like glass shaders. We faked them rendering twice: with a mirror, and without any transparent geo. Then, I comped them as a transparent layer. Door model by Giulio Marrone
With Lumen, lighting is real time, so art directing and testing is very fast. Here is an example of how I'd set up the lighting to create mood, make the shot readable and push the story forward.
This was the first shot we ever imported to Unreal Engine, so luckily I could document three different stages of it. From the first tests, to the final lighting.
We didn't have an animation team, so my brother Xabier and I added that to our never ending list of tasks. That meant we needed to animate most of the shots in 1-2 days. We achieved that by never animating things out of frame. Here is a good example of it
This shot was insane, around 45 seconds, animation of 7 characters, camera, boxes and a car falling, that had to match the music. It kept me awake for two weeks to animate, and lighting it was very intense too. Have fun looking at them out of camera!
More out of camera shots. In this one I wanted to showcase how much lighting, character and prop positions would change from one shot to another, when trying to convey what we had from the storyboard. Everything was cheated to make it look good on camera
A similar example, lighting changes here are very noticeable. I had to place lights so that they looked good per shot, but I also had to be aware of previous and next shot not to break continuity.
For those wondering about vfx. We never had any, we had to keyframe animate everything by hand, that meant we needed references... So I made my own at home! You may notice I had to slow down the fall to make it work better from camera.
This is a UE5 screenshot showing some of the environment building I did with the assets the team created.
The placing of objects was done considering camera placement. This means in some cases things will float or intersect when seen from any other view. We placed some dust and webs, which look very loaded here but it's varely noticeable in the final picture.
check out this small spider by David Puertas!
Just another screenshot showcasing toys designed by our team. Putting them together and crowding the scene was a bigger challenge than what I expected.
There werw a lot of papers and posters, fake trademarks etc in the short film, we had some fun with them. This one was done by Giulio Marrone, our MEME ARTIST.
This is the door area. Here I had quite a lot of work making the wall look natural enough, placing decals etc... Check out coworkers posts to learn more about the door and surrounding objects.
More toys! The designs are amazing and really feel like they belong to different toy companies.
Another example of creating a composition for a certain shot. After making a general enviro, I composed things shot by shot.
We had a small office aswell in one corner!
The Flame Fighters, a set of firefigher dragons were my addition to the environment. You can see them in previous pics.
[DISCLAIMER: Small Soldiers War for the Nekron is a Proof of Concept project in which our team was hired by Comadran Studios to create a set of toy characters during some months from 2022-2023. The conclussion of the project was the Proof of Concept trailer that brought those new characters to life. We would like to clarify that our team does not own these characters and we do not know what comes next for them after the this Proof of Concept. Designs and story might not represent the final product as they are subject to change during production.]
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My role in this project extended through all departments. With my brother Xabier Urrutia, we were in charge of creating, directing and art directing for the project, aswell as designing, modelling (with Giulio Marrone and David Puertas), animating, rigging the characters and lighting and compositing the short movie. Since I was also the one to do the storyboard and was in charge of lighting most of the short movie, I decided to do the scene assembly myself, with all the assets that Josu Martin, Xabier Sevillano, Giulio Marrone, David Puertas and Jesús Gómez created during months. They created an amazing set of assets and funny toys that I really recommend you to check out in their profiles. My brother and I also contributed to some creations of our own for the environment. I also added some assets from the Megascans Library that you might recognise.
In this post I bring you some behind the scenes videos that I prepared to show the work done for the Proof of Concept trailer.
Most of these things we take for granted when watching movies, but in CG you start from a white canvas, and everything you place in the world to make it believable has to be art directed to achieve the desired effect. That was our major focus on the project, to create a seemingly simple scenario, and to fill it with all the complexities of real life, while also trying to achieve a very dramatic and cinematic mood that would fit the story of these toys that take themselves way too seriously.