The above is a section from a short film that we worked on, directed by Nicola Rios. The film was shot in Puerto Rico, and about a night of rebellion, where a teenager confronts the disturbing truth that looms over her house in an effort to break free from her family's dysfunction. This trauma is represented by a giant spider living in the family's basement -- and that's where Codercat comes in.

the Spider

The scope was to have the spider start out in it's lair, crawl out and attack the protagonist. To get us all on the same page before we started working, Nicola provided a pre-visualization animatic of the spider motion for us. It is amazing to me how much a few simple hand drawn lines could convey! It was enough for us to have an idea of the general spider framing in the shot, it's size, proportions, and movement style.

Previs of the four spider shots. We came a long way!

Kif then iteratively modeled, rigged, and textured the spider. I recall that we were in Montenegro at the time, and were able to get real spider reference shots right outside our door.

Kif used these scouted spider references to develop the look and add realism. He also individually groomed every hair on each of the eight spider legs. I will tell him to elaborate on this here at some point!

While the hero asset was being developed, I was setting up the render and compositing pipeline. Each shot had it's own individual blender file, with camera, lighting, and proxy geometry to match the plates. I also created a procedural spider web in Houdini that I could scatter around the room for a nest like atmosphere.

Blender scene with proxy geometry and lighting to match the plate

With every major iteration of the spider, Kif would send me his blender file with the character and it's materials, and I would append the spider to each shot.

Spider resting on the bed in random color

Compositing

I was the REnDeR WRanGLeR. Most of what I learned here was how to efficiently manage five shots simultaniously. I am very thankful for naming conventions, and also our Blender deploy script! With this script, I could send multiple shots to our remote machine, and batch render them (and their shadow passes configured with a blender script) on their own GPU's.

Everything ran overnight, on it's own, and far away from me. I slept in silence, without the sound of my laptop fan taking off. At some point I was even batch rendering the final composites from Nuke on command line:)

On the creative side, some compositing work went into the spider webs and how to add realism. On top of the render of the 3D web, I collaged in some real spider web textures from a great photo pack on art station.

Compositing of the bed shot

A Day for Night shot was added to the list later -- breakdown below.

My first Day for Night shot!

Thank you for reading <3

TELERANA eight legged embodiment of dysfunction

the Spider

Compositing

Credits