Inspiration

Haeckel was a German biologist from nineteenth-century most famous for his work and drawings on radiolarians, a group of single-celled zooplankton, with beautiful and intricate mineral skeletons. They are found throughout the ocean, and their skeletal remains cover large portions of the ocean bottom. With their extensive variations of interesting symmetrical shapes I saw these  organisms as a great modeling challenge, that could possibly produce some really nice images.

Illustrations from "Radiolaria" (1887) by Ernst Haeckel

Creating the movie

The basic topological modeling was created in TopMod. A great piece of open source software, perfect for this type of geometric/organic modeling.

Modeling in TopMod

Selection of models in TopMod

Final modeling, texturing, animation and rendering was done i Maya. Compositing was done i AfterEffects.

The music in the film is Glacier by Supersole. Available at Opsound, the track is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Hence the movie is released under the same license.

Whats next

Future developments on the project will focus on more variations in models, color variations, light, particles and radical experiments on the final look of the film.

Previsualization

Kitchen, previsualization

Furniture, previsualization

Lighting, previsualization

Bedroom, previsualization

Shooting

The raw film was shot on location in HAUS and in studios.

Bedroom, scene setup

Bedroom, wire shoot

Kitchen, studio

Stockfootage

We needed a few quite specific effects in the movies: An exploding ice block and a table set on fire. The effects was shot at a separate  location, and added to the final movies.

Postproduction

Testing grass for the green furniture room:

Animated and rendered 3D lobster:

Removing unwanted objects in footage