Frostbiten, one month till dawn... Fido Film

#1

Hello everyone,

Thought it was time to show you guys and girls some of the VFX work that we at Fido Film did for the Swedish Vampire feature film “Frostbiten” last year. Fido Film handled all the character and creature based effects for the movie. The story takes place in a small town in the northern parts of Sweden, one month to go before the sun rises again… and there´s something lurking in the darkness.

After some back and forth to Kalix in the cold northern parts of Sweden (the cameras broke down because of the cold) and some relaxing days in the sunny southern city of Ystad (they told me there were going to be palmtress there… but no!) supervising shoots, we began the digital production in October. Prior to that our workshop had been busy designing and creating a lot of cool and gory stuff to be used in camera. After getting some precious extra time for the final shot we delivered the final frames in mid January. Just days before the final act was going to print…

With almost no pre production time to r&d what we were going to do we had to brute force our way through most of the production. A lot of the work involved digital make up enhancements and digital face replacements. We also got to do some full body character work of the ”Shape”, the bad guy Dr. Beckert´s mr Hide side of himself. The Shape was a mixture of a guy in a suit approach and the fully digital creature depending on what it needed to do. There were also a pair of digi-doubles and a bunch of talking dog shots as well as cg blades in different shapes and forms.

        Fido Film delivered:
        
        55 shots
        3 minutes of VFX
        
        Tools used:
        
        Maya
         MatchMover
         Zbrush
         Photoshop
         Shake
         After FX
         Our brains...

Anyhow, I won´t bore you with any more mumbo jumbo for now and treat you with some visuals instead. Following are some final frames from the movie as well as a reel with selected clips and breakdowns that I put together.

       [img]http://www.fido.se/frostbiten/FrostbitenREEL_640_2.jpg[/img]
       [High res image (half full res)](http://www.fido.se/frostbiten/FrostbitenREEL_1k_2.jpg)
      
       [img]http://www.fido.se/frostbiten/FrostbitenREEL_640_4.jpg[/img]
       [High res image (half full res)](http://www.fido.se/frostbiten/FrostbitenREEL_1k_4.jpg)
      
        [img]http://www.fido.se/frostbiten/FrostbitenREEL_640_5.jpg[/img]
       [High res image (half full res)](http://www.fido.se/frostbiten/FrostbitenREEL_1k_5.jpg)
      
       [Frostbiten REEL SMALL QuickTime (15 mb)](http://www.fido.se/frostbiten/FrostbitenREEL_S.mov)
        [Frostbiten REEL MEDIUM QuickTime  (31 mb)](http://www.fido.se/frostbiten/FrostbitenREEL_M.mov)
        
        Fire away with your comments or questions!
        
        Regards,
        
        Janak Thakker
                     Lead Animator/VFX supervisor
        Fido Film
#2

The screenshots look promising, downloading it now.

#3

(surprised that only one has replied :eek:)

Now this looks really cool :buttrock:

must have been a big pain in the big B to track everything, and still it looks amazing in the clips from the reel, nothing to comment on :slight_smile:

really cool effects with all the morphing and when the vampire dies and turns into ashes,
all in all a fantastic cool clip :thumbsup:

all hail Fido Film! hope to see more from you guys :applause:

#4

Wow, This looks fantastic! …And this is one of the hardest type of effects work. I mean it’s humanoid characters, close ups of cg faces, creatures crawling around walls and ceilings, morphs and etc… I get tired just thinking about it!
Awesome Fido!! :slight_smile:

#5

Fun to see some behind the scenes too! :slight_smile:

#6

great work! looks fantastic!

if only one could work at a company like yours! :love:

#7

Very impressive!! amazing work
How do you achieve the perfect alignment between the 3D face and the real one?

#8

Wow, incredible to see that hi-quality effects in a scandinavian movie!

What is the budget for the film, and what is the effects budget, if I may ask?

Super! :thumbsup:

Cheers,

  • Jonas
#9

Thanks for all the nice replys guys (and girls?)! :slight_smile:

Well it was a lot of hard work but I think the outcome was very rewarding none the less. The tracking was solved by making a 3d-reference object matching the tracking markers in the actors face as closely as possible. With one vertice att every tracking marker correctly placed in 3d-space we could then use this mesh in MatchMover with the rubber band tool to lock the 3d-mesh to the actors movement. This track was then brought into Maya where we could do some additional adjustments and tweaks where needed.

The entire budget for the film was something around 2 500 000 €, the special effects (both physical and digital) had a budget at around 500 000 €. Fido Film also did all of the physical effects such as blood squirts, make up and all kinds of gore and torn body parts.

Our core team on the digital side looked like this:
1 (and a half :)) modeller
2 animators
2 texturing and rendering artists
2 compositing artists

The team grew and shrunk according to the needs of the project. On top of this we also had our creative director and two persons working full time making sure that everything ran smoothly, made sure the scheduling worked out and that shots were delivered on time. I don´t think we could have done this without the meticulous planning they set up.

Cheers,

Janak

#10

Very nice mate, incredible if you concider the small team!

Thumbs up!!

#11

Thanks man, glad to hear that you like it!

// J

#12

Thought that there might be some interest for some ZBrush screens:


#13

Hi Janak,

impressive stuff you’ve got here, congrats with that. I was thinking: wouldn’t it be great if someone in your situation could make a case study of a full shot like one of those on your reel?
I mean, there are millions of individual tutorials on the net but never a full explanation of how they’ve made a shot from start to finish…
take for example the second shot on your reel:
-how do you guys paint away the markers from the original plate? (what application do you use?).
-do you manually keyframe the 3D reference object you talked about earlier to match the markers?
-why exactly do you export that 3D reference object to ‘Matchmover’? (can’t you just link the head bone of your character rig to the 3D reference object in the same application?)
-how do you erase the character’s head (see mirror shot) without knowing what’s behind him? (+what piece of software do you use for these things?)

I’m sure I’ve asked a lot of stupid things but hopefuly you can help me understand some of these things (and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who has these questions…)

anyway, thanks in advance

Foane

#14

I’m scared. Very good!

#15

Look fantastic… Fabulous job…:thumbsup:
Congratulations

#16

Great WORK !!!
Can you show us the wires? Thank you !!!

#17

Thanks guys!

foane: great questions! Unfortunately I don´t have time to answer them right now, going on vacation any minute now :slight_smile: But I´ll make sure to give you a full answer as soon as I´m back to work!

Emiliano: eumh… you wan´t too see more wires than the ones in the reel? Or do you want too see wires of something else? :slight_smile:

RealViz just published a case-study on the work that we did for Frostbiten, you can find it here: http://sfx.realviz.com/products/showcase.php?id=63&product=mpro

Cheers,

J

#18

cheers man,

I’m looking forward to your reply, good luck on your vacation!

foane

#19

nice :slight_smile: coolt att man får se lite svensk vapyrulle.

#20

Very awesome! I’m not a fan of gore, but that was pretty tight! Nice job! :smiley: