AMOK

From the Malay "āmuk", the term refers to an uncontrollable murderous rage, sometimes resulting in murder-suicide. Amok can be used to describe both the perpetrator of a murderous act and the act itself.

"When Man becomes wilder than the beast"

Haunted by his obsessive need for vengeance, a hunter goes deep into the harch tropical jungle to find his nemesis : the black panther.

This short film explores the psychological dimension of the hunter's murderous madness, set against the beauty of nature and the panther that symbolizes it.

Creating the characters

The Panther

Here are some research for the panther's attitude / poses, and body mechanics. We tried to play with the silhouette of the tail as much as possible, to give a more dynamic feeling.

The challenge was to make "our panther", so we slightly stylized its silhouette by marking a few characteristic features of these animals.

We modeled the skeleton in order to be anatomically correct and to support the muscles (for simulations)

Aaron

For the hunter, we mainly focused on the general silhouette and feeling the character was giving. We wanted to create a heavy, grounded character, while maintaining realistic proportions.

We wanted to create a face that was both marked and striking, which we would fully reveal at a key moment in the film.

We added a simplified muscle layer, to help speed up the sculpt process, and understand more easily how the different parts of his body would move. Here are the body & head turns for Aaron

While working on the iterations of the character, we kept a close collaboration between the concept and 3D sculpt department, to have more accurate wound shapes, according to the action playing in the movie

Rigging & Animation

For the panther's rig, we created blendshapes for most of the deformations, as we tried to keep natural and logical movements for the wrinkles

For Aaron, we made a joint-based facial rig, and implemented blendshapes for the more difficult parts like the corners of his mouth & nose, and the wrinkles of the eyebrows & forehead.

The walk & run cycles helped a lot to speed up the animation deadlines of some shots. It also allowed a continuity within particular sequences.

For some parts of the action, the final render is quite close to what we had at the 2D animatic stage.

CFX : hair & cloth

Each character's groom was created in Houdini

For the panther, there was not much necessity for groom simulation. Only a few close-up shots, or with contact, or with muscles simulation were simulated as the character would always be moving fast through most of the shots.

For Aaron, we simulated his clothes and hair using our own template in Houdini. It allowed us to decide what parts of the clothing and hair needed simulations or not, depending on the shot. 

Muscles & skin simulations

Once the first animation tests for the panther were out, we developped a muscle system. We wanted to give a more organic and realistic feeling on top of the rig / blendshapes deformations. Here is a shot with muscles and skin simulation.

Lookdev

Environments

We modeled and textured most of our vegetation ourselves, no fewer than 75 assets (vegetation, trees, rocks, ground, creepers...) with variations. We acquired the missing assets from Quixel Megascan. With these assets mixed together, we created all the movie's environments.

Here is a demo of the scatter tool we developed to scatter all types of large and small geometries. It helped a lot speeding up both the scattering process and render time. 

Items

Aaron

Compositing

Here are a few shots breakdowns showing dressing, beauty, lighting, relighting, post-effects, grading etc.

Meet the team 

Océane BANON : ([email protected]) - Modeling, Surfacing, Lighting, Compositing, Dressing

Matthieu BARBAZA : ([email protected]) _ Animation, Layout, Editing

Léo CECCALDI : ([email protected]) - Animation, Rigging, Storyboard, Layout, Concept Art, Keyshot, Chara design

Luce DOUILLON : ([email protected]) - Rigging, Rig Dev, Blendshapes, Prod, FX, CFX

Adrien DUSSAUD : ([email protected]) - CFX, Groom, Tool Dev, FX, Compositing

Océane FAURE : ([email protected]) - Chara Modeling, Sculpt, Surfacing, Lighting, Dressing

Jade HOFFSTETTER : ([email protected]) - Animation, Layout

Apolline KOEHRER : ([email protected]) - Original script, Prod, Groom, Surfacing, Lighting, Dressing, Compositing, Pipeline, CFX

Adrien WOLFERT : ([email protected]) - Lighting, Modeling, Sculpt, Dressing, Surfacing, Compositing

Original Score by :

Dorian LEHMANN ([email protected])

Voice : 

Fred Perchet ([email protected])

Sound Design & Mixing by :

Studio des Aviateurs, José VICENTE, Guilhem FAVARD

Breakdown recap