"Pit" | CGI Animated Short Film (2020)

What would you do if your prized possession is lost in an unfamiliar place?

A Boy kicks his ball too high and it accidentally lands into the ditch. He has no other choice but to go down and retrieve it. As he ventures into the darkness, he encounters an unexplained situation that will ultimately shake his worldview.

"Pit" was inspired by childhood experiences, as a kid, we always used to play sports that required us to kick or throw something, be it a Football, a Soccer ball, a Basketball or even a Frisbee. But as we much as we catch it, we let it go too leading to unexpected circumstances. The ball might go too far and roll under a car, into someones window, "Through" someones window or the worst, into a dark drain. And when it does, we have to retrive it. And it is a scary experience.

Set in a modern day, a lonely boy growing up in a factory-filled neighborhood has his only companion, his football. As he spends most of his time with his best buddy, things take an unexpected turn and he must now convince himself to go down and pick up his possession. As a child, when we stumble into an unfamiliar environment, our imagination starts taking over sanity, we imagine horrifying things lurking around every corner waiting to hurt us. From this film, we tend to utilize the concept of "Fear The Unknown" which manifests on the Boy's encounter, because what we can't see, can hurt us, so as things escalate quickly, the Boy is reduced to a single instinct - survive.

Lucas, The Boy. Our Protagonist.

We start off with our main protagonist Lucas, or The Boy, as we like to call him. Lucas is not a well-off child and with that, the Illustration team took this into account for his overall design and decided to give him simple looking (not so raggedy) clothing. 
As for his silhouette we realized that if we were to have a character out-running an unknown creature in the sewers, we needed him to be agile and quick, therefore we went with a slim and thin frame for Lucas.

The Character Modeler in charge of the protagonist studied plenty on learning XGen & advanced texturing/shading in V-Ray from scratch. This boosted the aesthetics of our character model by a mile compared to our previous iterations as shown above.

The Creature, our "antagonist". 

We had many, MANY sketches and concepts of The Creature as it was a very vague term in the beginning. But as our Illustrators explored further, we narrowed it down to a Biped-Snake-Slug-like Creature. We decided that giving The Creature a more nimble snake like appearance would be scarier and creepier, therefore we went forward with this design.

The Creature is made out of metal parts and scraps dumped into the sewer pit throughout the years. And with this idea in mind we again explored further.

Environments

As we had a total of 5 different major environments (excluding tunnels connecting these chambers), our Illustrators spent most of their time on creating concepts and exploring different versions of the same environments. 

We narrowed them down to these few, modeled, textured and lit them accordingly.

We also explored more on "Node-Based Texturing" to create a sharper and more accurate detailing for the environments as shown below. And with that we also improved the lighting from our previous iterations.

As for "node-based texturing", 

the modelers were comfortable with just texturing with Substance Painter. But we quickly realized that we weren't able to achieve the level of detail we wanted with just Painter. Therefore we started exploring more ways of texturing.

The image on the left shows the result we got from Painter, and the images on the right show the result we got from "node-based texturing". Using Autodesk Maya's hypershade, we combined multiple nodes and seamless texture maps to create high quality detailed environment without sacrificing much.

The images below are the Color Scripts and Key Art pieces done by our Illustrators. 

We set a few references and moods for each Act and built upon that.

You can also see the 3D vs 2D comparisons of the main environments below.

And to wrap it up, 

here are the final composited still images taken from the film!