Origin

Our short film, Origin, is about two gods, sun god and water goddess, competing to nurture a growing plant.

Two gods, Sun god and Water goddess, who believes that they are more important to the plants growth, starts to show off their powers. Trying to prove that they have the capability to take care of the plant themselves, they start to display their abilities. Each time they did, the plant flourished. But as it continued, the plant, unable to withstand their elements began to wither. The gods soon realise this and rush to save the plant together. They recognise the importance of their cooperation, that without it nothing can grow.

We wanted to write a story exploring the themes of family and cooperation. The two gods were written as parent figures who thought their own ways of nurturing was the best and only way. The story revolves around how their selfish actions can lead to other people around them or in this case, the plant, suffering from the consequences of their arrogance.

Initially, the ending of the film was written to have a more darker tone where the plant perishes. But through that, the gods realise they have to work together if they want to breathe new life into their world. This was to portray that some consequences are permanent and can’t actually be fixed with magic. Nonetheless, we have to learn from it and do better.

Sun god and Water goddess

When designing these characters, our team wanted to try and explore designs that were not so human looking, given that both the characters were imagined to be gods/celestial brings. However the designs became too complicated and we had to simplify them. We still wanted our audience to be able to connect with these characters after all.

Our characters were characterised by their shapes. While Sun god sported an upside down triangle to give him that big strong guys vibe, our water goddess was dressed in rounded shapes to show off a more gentle princess-like personality. Our 2D and 3D artists worked together during this phase to help make sure that the concept art that was drawn could be translated well into 3D models. 

To incorporate each character’s elements in their design. We gave Sun god sun-pattern tattoos that would shine whenever he used his ability and for Water goddess we designed her dress to have water ripples flowing down it.

Here are our final concept arts from our 2D artists for both these characters.

After that, our 3D artists then modelled and textured the two gods accordingly. During transition, we decided to animate Sun God's fire hair in 2D and keep Water Goddesses hair in one piece instead of using Xgen for both. This helped to keep the stylised look we were going for.

Both gods were rigged with the usual human setup, as most of our attention was spent towards perfecting the complicated plant rig setup that you'll see later on. For Water Goddess our rigger had to add additional joints for her hair as well.

Plant (Character)

As the main character of the story, we wanted our little plant to stand out. To accomplish this we tried to give the plant the ability to express emotions by giving it a face. This resulted in the sprout looking like an alien. 

Simplifying the design was easy; we just designed a bunch of flowers deciding that in the end, a normal flower would be more simple and recognisable. Just like the god characters, we developed the designs of the flower in both 2D and 3D at the same time. 

Our 2D artists also created a growth chart for our modelers and riggers to reference later on. This also helped to show where the growth of the plant is at throughout the film

Since the plant represented the god’s eventual cooperation, we didn’t want the colour of it to favor a certain god. Mixing both their colours would kind of create a purple-ish colour but ultimately we settled on a pinkish-puplish colour to give it a more child-like, innocent appearance. 

Here is the final 3D look.

Throughout the film, the plant would grow from a sprout to a blooming flower and we needed its rig to be able to fulfill that.

Initially we planned to model and rig each plant stage separately before importing it into the scenes, but soon realised that it couldn’t give us the “growing” effect that we wanted. So the rigger assigned to this task utilized blend shapes to allow animators to swap between the different stages more efficiently and seamlessly.

Environment

Origin technically took place in two locations: a barren land where the majority of the film took place and a green land which appeared after the god’s epiphany. 

Our 2D environmental artists envisioned the transition between the two lands and how it would be constructed in 3D space. 

Various flora for each lands was also designed for each land. 

After everything was finalised, our 3D artists started work on the models. 

Colour Script

Colour scripting created a guideline for our lighting and rendering phase later on. It also helped us figure out the mood we were going for in each act. Here is the colour script that was done by our concept artists.

VFX

VFX was a huge part of our film and we wanted to get it right from the start. As we experimented with different styles of effects, we were drawn to the traditional 2D animated effects as it fit well with the overall concept and look of our film.

Before going into production phase, our 2D vfx artists charted out the evolution of the god’s powers throughout the film to ensure the intensity of their power was balanced with the other.

They also created concept animation for the visual effect animators to reference later on during production in the next semester. 

VFX in production started after the affected animated shot was in polishing stage. Most of the VFX was animated in either Adobe Animate or After effects.

Animation

The style of our animation was more stylised, referencing Disney princesses for the Water goddess along with characters such as Maui and Mr. Incredibles for the Sun god.

To keep the animation style consistent, we had to split our animators to groups and assigned a character to each respective groups to animate. A smaller group meant it was easier to control the work and animation for each character.

Rendering and Composition

Originally we had referenced another short film titled “Fol’ Amor” which was more 2D looking. This style of rendering started from the texturing of the models. We hand painted the ambient occlusion with textured brushes and even where the closest shadow might fall off on all the models during our texturing phase. This helped to give off the 2D hand painted effect that we wanted.

However as the production progressed we had to change the lighting to better fit our film and the rendered outcome began to take its own direction.

Conclusion

Overall, it has been an enlightening experience. Although there were many ordeals and challenges, we managed to overcome them all as a team. Just like the characters of our film, without each other nothing would’ve come to fruition.