Summer Apprenticeship Update

Our Summer Production Apprenticeship is nearing the half-way point, and we wanted to start sharing the work that the apprentices have been producing.

The goal of Escape Studios' Summer Production Apprenticeship is to give junior artists a chance to gain some new skills and refine those they already have by working together in a part-time production-based class for 12 weeks. Like all of Escape Studios' courses, this apprenticeship is focused on skills that have practical application at a studio.

The first order of business was to develop a project that exercised these skills, and our goal of integrating CG elements into filmed backgrounds. After many ideas were discussed and brainstormed, the group settled on a short sequence showing a toy car race presented as a real car race, but at the scale of a toy.

The project will allow apprentices to create highly-detailed assets of not only the two cars in the race, but the household items used by the kids having the race to form a track. Every asset built has an actual real-world counterpart that has been measured and photographed.

Setting the race in a garage will allow control over lighting the background plates, placement of cameras and can be left standing between shoots. It also provides lots of natural tracking markers in the frame.

While our animatic is around 30 seconds, we don't plan on completing all of the shots this summer (some of which don't have effects in them). Apprentices will focus on a handful of effects-heavy shots and complete them before moving onto the other surrounding work if time permits. Part of the real work of creating visual effects is making them fit into the context of a larger work, so we needed a context for our shots.

CG will allow the apprentices to make toy cars do things they can't normally do: swerve, jump and crash, and will also allow them to put the camera places it can't normally go when filming small things: on the hood of a toy car, or in the driver's seat. But we will be adhering to the behavior of a full-sized camera filming small toys, so our shots will feature shallow depth of field to maintain the scale of our subject. CG will also allow apprentices to "film" at high frame rates for certain shots to get the slow motion effects that are required for cinematic car races.

The apprentices put together exhaustive lists of movies to review that featured car races, chases and crashes. Apprentices will continue to refer back to this reference to create realistic car and camera movement.

1/22nd scale was chosen for our hero toys as it is large enough to see detail clearly at the focal lengths we'll be using, and because die cast cars at that scale are easy to obtain and have doors and hoods that open (say when they crash, for instance). We confirmed this by doing tests with cars of various sizes using a variety of cameras (including iPhones and GoPros)

A trip to Toys-R-Us and an order on Amazon.com got us our two cars: a white Mustang Shelby and a replica of the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazard TV show (did I mention the jumping?).

As you can see in this video, modeling of cars and props is underway as are look development and shader tests. The next steps will be creating layered textures for our models and shooting our plates.

Apprentices have already spent several hours on location testing lighting, blocking animation and working with the camera they'll be using to shoot (Canon 5D Mark II)

We'll have regular updates for you in the coming weeks including a chance to hear from the apprentices themselves about their work and what they are learning.