SOLON

"How do we shape a project that allows as many as possible of our specialized classmates to challenge themselves?"

This was the initial question behind SOLON, one of the projects by the Netherlands Film Academy VFX class of 2022. And after a lot of hard work, we proudly present our teaser trailer!

As this project was made next to the regular curriculum, we worked really hard as a team to carefully plan the whole production. This began by making a style file with all concepts, ideas and plans for the shoot.

To prepare well for the shoot, we used Unreal Engine to make a previsualization.

Our creature artist came up with the idea of Solon, inspired by the actual Solon who was a lawmaker and poet in Athens around 500 BC. That Solon was considered very wise, and this inspired us to create an intelligent alien that wasn't after violence but rather a very curious creature.

For animation, we used both motion capture and traditional keyframe animation.

Our environment artist built a lot of assets to create the world that our Solon finds. The final layout was done in Houdini.

As SOLON is set on a huge dam, our FX artist focused on creating a big water simulation using Houdini. Here are some progress pictures and the final comp:

Here are some shot breakdowns:

And here's some behind-the-scenes from our shoot!