ALICE XIA
Swan Song Short Film
Swan Song was my thesis film project I created over the span of 1.5 years with my teammates Christina Shi and Ellie Hui. This page is going to be about specifically what I contributed to the project and breakdowns. For more information about the project as a whole, please navigate to the "Thesis" button on the header.
For this project, I acted as the Technical Director and Environment Lead, so most of my contributions are in making sure the entire pipeline works and troubleshooting any technical issues with rigging and animation, along with bringing the imaginary environment my teammates had in mind to life in 3D, using modeling, texturing, set dressing, simulations, and lighting/compositing. Along with those responsibilities, I also helped with pre-visualization, camera animation, layout, and character animation.
Swanlake Section Breakdown
This is one of the scenes I was primarily responsible for in the film. For this scene, I worked on environment modeling/texturing, set dressing, grass simulation, sculpting, lighting, compositing, rigging, and animation for the second shot.
For this scene, we follow our characters as they reminisce their relationship through this dance, which we have referenced from Swan Lake. I wanted to focus on their love and connection shown through this dance. The cameras are focused on them, with a secondary focus on the statue in the background that resembles them performing this same choreo back in the day. The mood is inviting, warm, and romantic. The environment is supposed to be dreamy and surreal. To achieve this effect, I worked with a limited color palette with very subdued pinks and greens throughout the environment. Using compositing, I animated the tree leaves flowing in the back, and pushed the environments back by defocusing with a pink hue to bring the focus to the characters.
The statues were taken from the character's original animated pose, then I sculpted ballet performance clothes on them and painting it all with a cracked, overgrown, old statue texture. This is supposed to resemble the history of their relationship, implying that they've danced this dance before on stage as partners. The swan flows in midair, frozen in this beautiful moment with them.
I had to do a lot of experimenting with the treeleaves to get the stylized look we wanted. There was a lot of trial and error, but I ultimately ended up using warped planes in maya with a painted texture layered with opacity mapping, the colors sampled from the grass and sky to blend the two together.
Proof of Concept Breakdown
This scene was our proof of concept, a first look into the film and the stylized world we wanted to replicate throughout the film. We used this scene to experiment with a lot of workflows to create the look we wanted for this world. Over the summer, I did stylization experiments with painted normals in substance painter, compositing with filters and AOVs in nuke, and MASH combined with painted alphas to create the grass.
I used MASH to create a grass simulation workflow for the environments. I used this scene as the example and created a MASH template, 5 MASH networks made of all kinds of grass and flowers animated that was then applied procedurally to all other scenes in this world. Using this workflow, we were able to interchange the flowers and grass types seamlessly and texture the grass porcedurally, making sure the shades work across a large spam of the scene.
Another problem we solved with this scene was how to setdress and render a huge environment with arnold. We used a bunch of methods including stand-ins, instanced props and render layers to optimize the render time and made sure we could tackle this scale across the film. The grass sim was created in a proxy maya scene and imported as a stand-in to the final lighting scene. The pillars and gravestones are at most 3 variations of a prop that's instanced and varied by hiding/showing certain parts of the model.
Stage Section Breakdown
This was another section of the film that I was primarily responsible for. The final section where Delta steps back into the real world. The look and feel for these scenes had to be different and more realistic than the previou imaginary world scenes. I was responsible for environment modeling/texturing, set dressing, lighting, compositing, rigging, and animation.
For this whole section, I wanted the focus to be solely on our main character Delta, as she reaches the conclusion of this story. The audience in world and in real life is focused on her. The lighting is very bright stage lighting with the background of the stage blurred and darkened. There should be nothing unique or interesting about the stage or curtains, only serving as a guide towards Delta's final performance. I referenced shots from Lalaland, when the audience was taken into Seb's inner world. I used bright, blown out spotlights and harsh rim lighting on her to create that effect. The spotlight I rendered out separately as an atmosphere pass in arnold and composited on later in Nuke to have more control over the intensity.
For the rig, this outfit change was put on the same rig as her leotard outfit, with a simple set driven key visibility driver, so we can use the same rig across the whole film. For the skirt, I used simple fk chains and some blendshapes, as it's supposed to be a bouncy, rigid material that allows some give.
The animation I referenced from a stage curtsy tutorial on youtube. I wanted it to be very restrained and graceful, with the eyes following her right arm as it creates this beautiful arc.
