A work for The Fish ><////°> in collaboration with the great team of HD MADE
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XPRIZE is a nonprofit that has designed and operated seventeen competitions in the domain areas of Space, Oceans, Learning, Health, Energy, Environment, Transportation, Safety and Robotics since 1994. They have launched over $140 million in prize purses creating industry-changing technologies.
The $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE aims to create an avatar system that can transport human presence to a remote location in real time. 77 Teams from 19 Countries have been selected by the Avatar XPRIZE Judging Panel.
To explore the potential of the future of avatars, science fiction stories can provide great ideas. That’s why XPRIZE decided to create a website that hosts a contest of avatar stories, along with those of established writers and famous illustrators. To create the website and the video presentation, XPRIZE contacted HD MADE and they contacted me 🙂
The video shows an astronaut coming to Mars to rescue a memory device hidden in an avatar that contains all the stories available on the website.
First I had to write the story and define the shots. The best way to do this was to use pencil and paper, scan, and then continue working in Photoshop.
I am not a good drawer but I made some clear and very descriptive sketches of what I wanted to explain. I worked on the film shots and narrated what happened in the story. Then a professional illustrator in the team gave the final touch to make it beautiful and clear to the client.
This phase was also when I looked for the most spectacular possible shots but trying to save resources taken into account that the timeline was tight.
Given the time constraints, for the astronaut, we needed a rigged body that we could animate quickly. Thanks to Adobe Mixamo, we found what we needed: a futuristic astronaut body and suit that we could modify and much predefined motion captures that we could use and adapt in Cinema 4D.
We saved a lot of time, although the solution was not perfect because we wanted a more sophisticated and realistic face, as well as a helmet that would look good. In the end, we got the face we wanted and a helmet suitable for the Martian adventure.
As the work progressed, we also saw that making the animations we wanted was not going to be so easy, although in the end, we succeeded with hours of adjustments and dedication.
We had to prepare a ship in Cinema 4D that had the colors and logo of the sponsor (the Japanese airline ANA), as well as the logo of the website.
In the cockpit of the spacecraft, our astronaut had to feel comfortable for her journey from Phobos to a small abandoned mining base on the surface of Mars and surround it with a mixture of digital technology with buttons and analog controls.
For the landing, I decided that the most realistic option was to use volumetric VDB smoke because it would allow making realistic effects like including the shadows of the rocket itself in the dust or the incidence of the lights of the engines.
To mimic the Martian atmosphere in a realistic way it was clear to me that we needed to use a rendering engine that had the best qualities to recreate the light, the dust, and its greenish sky. I decided that Arnold was the best option because it would also allow fast render times with very high quality if we optimized its parameters well.
For the soil dotted with stones, rocks, hills, and other elements of the Martian landscape I chose Quixel Megascans, which I consider the best library for this task. Combined with Substance, we had the best resources at a reasonable price.
For the memory card container that contained all the stories on the website, we modeled a damaged and abandoned mining avatar with just enough energy to beep and scan the arrival of our astronaut.
We conceived a very big, rough avatar, with big arms ready for hard work, with a lot of dirt but with some familiarity and a nice touch in its appearance.
Once we had all the material rendered in a render farm, it was time to edit the video, add sound effects, and color grading in Davinci Resolve. To top it off, we spent several days adding and polishing many effects in post-production using After Effects.
And this is the final result.
I hope you like it!