Project Penguin was an ambitious project that I took on for my senior capstone at Ferris State University. It was more that just a visual effects piece, because it required me to be involved in every step of the production process from storyboarding to acting to directing. In only 4 months I had to produce something that represented my technical skills and make it look good too.

Here are all of the shot breakdowns I have made for this so far:

Storyboarding:

While not being very story driven, I did want this short film to have forward momentum that carries the audience through to the final scene. Therefore, I drew up several ideas I had until I developed the final storyboard of a penguin fleeing captivity. Here are some samples:

Making The Penguin:

First off, I looked at many pictures of penguins until I chose a species that best represented the size and shape of what I was going for, the Adelie Penguin. After several sketches, I decided to make and orthographic character sheet.

Then, the pengiun was modeled and textured in Zbrush.

After that, the radio collar was created and everything was brought into XSI to await the filming.

Filming:

The filming was done using my school's Canon XH-A1, a tripod, and one portable green screen. Other than that, I had to come up with everything myself. Fortunately, my friends and I had recently got into airsoft, so we had most of the replica army equipment. As for the property and the quad, those are my parents.

Filming Day 1:

Unfortunately, things don't always work out as they should. After weeks of organizing my friends and renting out the school's equipment, the weather was less than friendly. If the overcast clouds and bitter cold weren't enough, the snow was to deep for the scenes with the quad! I ended up scraping most of the footage that was shot this day.

Filming Days 2 & 3:

On these days, a friend and I traveled to a large hill here in town to film the sequence of the penguin sliding down. In order to do a point of view perspective, I had the idea of sitting in a sled while someone else slowly lowered me down with a rope. I would then stabilze and speed up the footage later on.

Filming Day 4:

A couple of weeks later, I was finally able to get the main shooting done on a nice day. Conditions were perfect, but I think my friends started to resent me by the end of the day.

Tracking and XSI:

After the filming was completed, the next daunting task was to capture and edit all the film that was usable. When a previsualized composition was put together, I was able to start tracking the shots with the penguin in them using Boujou. I then exported those tracks into Softimage XSI to start matching my penguin up to the shot.

In order to do this, however, I had to learn XSI since I have never used it. I have mostly worked in 3d Studio Max, but XSI's animation tools appealed to me. So in about two weeks I learned how to model, animate, and render as well as apply fur to simulate feathers. On top of that, I also spent some time learning the XSI Ice particle system for foot steps and snow debris.

Compositing and FX:

For compositing, there was a ton of rotoscoping to be done. The green screen I had could only do so much, so I spent alot of time in After Effects creating masks. As for the effects, I mainly used footage I got from videocopilot.net, but I did some simulations. For the explosion at the end I decided to attempt to learn Fume Fx, but found that it requires a lot of time to simulate particles, so the explosion ended up being less than extraordinary.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, 4 months probably was not enough time to fully realize what I had envisioned Project Penguin to be. Having four other classes at the time did not help either, but I feel proud of the final piece I produced. I meant only to create something to demonstrated my technical skills, but I believe I created something more.