OH, SHIPPED!

This long-term project ran over the whole year as part of the postgraduate Visual Effects programme at George Brown College. As a cross-functional project involving students from various programmes (including scriptwriting, film, acting, sound and VFX), it proved to be an interesting challenge and a fantastic insight into the filmmaking process.

The concept was 8 ships, 8 stories (one for each student on the VFX), but with a shared theme that would allow each short film to be combined into one narrative. The scriptwriting team wrote simple, character-driven scripts based around the idea of a spaceport ship rental booth that various groups were passing through. Each group of actors would enter, choose a ship, teleport onto that ship and then fly away after some sort of discussion, allowing for various different VFX shots (holograms, heads-up-displays, spaceships, etc.).

We had two filming weekends at the school: one on set (for the spaceport scene) and one in the green screen room (for the ship scene). We then built various assets and effects, compositing them with the footage as required. Software used included Maya, Houdini, Substance, Nuke, and After Effects. I made fully CG external shots of the spaceport, several CG elements for the internal spaceport shots and merged green screen footage and CG elements for the shots of characters on the ship. The ship was modelled, rigged, animated and rendered in Maya, with FX elements added from Houdini and composited in After Effects.

Due to various external constraints and conflicts, the project remained unfinished at the end of the academic year. Nevertheless, I created a rough cut of my film for grading and received excellent feedback. I am delighted to have had the opportunity to work with fellow students from other programmes on set and to get a feel for the production process from start to finish.