Visiting: Episode 1

Grounded by a malfunctioning ship, a routine journey ends in disaster. Faced with giant alien landscapes, a miniature visitor must explore his challenging surroundings to gather the resources to help him return safely home. The first taste of this project by Louis duMont gives a great taste of what could be ahead and we certainly want to see more. Speaking about the project Louis has this to say…

Visiting has been an on-again, off-again project I’ve been working on since 2009. It was started as a litttle CG match-moving test shot and over the years has been a test bed for new techniques and experimentation.

I’m always walking around with a camera and love taking street and cityscape shots and thought a small visitor that could experience this world in new ways would make for a fun visual.

In 2014 I storyboarded an episode to introduce the idea of a series of little shorts that allowed me to walk around capturing little moments that the visitor could experience. After creating an animatic we organised a one-day shoot in July of that year.

Visiting uses a variety of techniques made possible by more budget-friendly tech in recent years. This episode was shot 4K on the Panasonic Lumix GH4 with a set of micro four third lenses. Endlessly shooting footage at 1000Mb/s on 2x64GB cards.

After the shoot a Mocrosoft Kinect was used with Ipi Soft to capture the general motions to be re-targeted on to the visitors rig.

Modelling, surfacing and animation was created in Lightwave 3D and rendered over 5 nodes with intel i7 4770k cpu’s using Amleto render commander, averaging 5 minutes per frame. The renders were composited in After Effect, the edit and grade in Premier Pro and the sound mix in Audition.

Credits:
Louis duMont – Director
Jon Reidy – Producer
Raymond Bethley – Actor
Emma Clark – Asst. Producer
Javier Martin – Roto Artist