ammopreviz making of "folie"

ANTICS 3d

"Folie a Duex" was a winner of the Antics medical competition Feb 2008. The 2minute clip was created using Antics 3d. Antics is an easy to use, rapid previz system.

It allows you create sets, set up cameras and then animate characters. It allows the user to communicate ideas and concepts and create animated storyboards.

Folie a duex.

The film gives us a glimpse into one woman's troubled mind as she battles with what is reality and what is considered normal. The title when loosely translated, means "a madness shared by two". The proposition suggests there are two individuals but in fact the distinction is left open to interpretation. Perhaps it is the doctor having the delusions with the girl, or perhaps the girl has a twin who shares her illness. It's also quite possible the girl has a split personality which suffers from the same dream trips. In any case, part of the challenge of the short clip was creating a story with depth.

The Girl in the Tub Being a red blooded Aussie the first thing I tried when Antics released the content pack with the girl in the blue dress was to see if I could set the dress to transparent! No apologies there. Anyway, the intention was to build this bath sequence where the water levels are rising and the dress is hanging in the background. I used a a couple of billboards for the water levels (to keep a PG rating!) and a cylinder mapped with rain for the tap water. For the most part I tried to build sets and props using the materials from the library. It's possible to get stuff from outside faster if you can modify library content.	Mirror Early in the planning stages I began investigating a mirror technique using antics. The program itself does not have a reflection attribute, so the effect had to be achieved "old school". The entire bathroom scene was created and then duplicated with a hole in the wall for where the mirror would be placed. The lighting had to be economically used as there is a limit to the number of lights available. The character I chose for this scene also had a head which didn't suit my vision for the character so that made it a little more tricky as the reflection character also had to have the head "swapped out". The tiles in the room where built as a tile by tile basis with each one being a squished cube. This allowed for the cube attribute to be animated when the ship enters the room.
The Cell of Armchairs Here is a great example of using library content to build a set. The soft rippled texture was mapped onto an armchair and then duplicated until the walls were built. This set took about an hour and the frame below (as with most of the frames featured) is right from Antics.	Doc looks on The unlit doc looks great in front of this set.
Sleeping As simple as this setup looks it was actually a very difficult effect to achieve. There are no expressions in Antics for the Characters, so to get her eyes closed I had to paint on the texture map and then fill the eye socket with little spheres. I painted a shader for the eyelid texture maps. I found that incorporating the eyelash map into the face map (bottom edge of eye) really nailed the eye closed effect. The sheet on the bed also got a makeover in paint to simulate shading and the sheet on her was from a patient model in the medical pack. I had to scale it to fit my woman's body.	Beside Manner What a caring fellow he is. the corridor set ended up on the cutting room floor. This work in progress shot shows some of the issues with getting the woman on the bed, pillow and sheets. I really like the warmth of this shot but the mood wasn't going to fit into the cut, so I axed it.

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ANTICS 3d

Folie a duex.