The Crawling Shadows of Fearnmore - Trailer + breakdown

elbriga writes:

Here is my latest personal project, The Crawling Shadows of Fearnmore - Trailer:

I undertook this project with the following objectives:

1. Experiment and establish a functional workflow for a AAA trailer production, including: preproduction and storyboarding, art direction, asset modeling, cloth simulation, texturing, rigging and skinning, grooming, animation, physics simulation, lighting, compositing, VFX, sound effects, composing and recording soundtrack, color correction, editing and final delivery.
2. Strengthen my knowledge of rigging and animation of a humanoid character, of cloth simulation in Marvelous designer, and of texturing in the Substance suite.
3. 3. Experiment with lighting and color correction methods to give substance to the final video, bringing it closer to real, raw granular film, inspired from the 80's.

I made this small trailer while experimenting in all production stages, and studying the most fitting tools.

Software used:

• Marvelous Designer for cloth simulation.
• Blender for modeling, UV unwrapping, animation, rigging, skinning, grooming, lighting...
• Substance painter for texturing.
• Blender Cycles for rendering.
• Davinci Resolve for color correction and editing.
• Reaper for sound creation, SFX and music.

Here you can find a breakdown with pretty much all the steps:

And as a bonus, the extended version of the soundtrack is available for download on soundcloud below. It was very inspired by the original Quake soundtrack from Nine Inch Nails, and home-recorded (lots of breathing into the microphone :P)

The trailer takes place in a universe inspired from Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes, and the 'Alone in the dark' series. A detective investigates some surnatural occurences in a small village of Scottland. After some strange and mysterious encounters with the characters of the village, and having faced the untamed elements, he will be lead to discover nightmarish creatures, who have wandered into our world from an hostile parallel universe. The story begins by focusing on the character, an anti hero whose physical strenght still doesn't compensate for his moral and intellectual weaknesses, and who has trouble holding his ground as he faces one obstacle after an other. Slowly, his weaknesses will make him give up to the surnatural forces and to the wild power of nature.

This project was a huge learning experience, especially on how much work it is to follow a full workflow for video production, planning the project, going back and forth between software... A lot went into these measly seconds of animation, but I hope you appreciate it! You can see the project in my portfolio as well.

Cheers, and happy blending!

Elbriga