BRAVE CREATURES PRODUCTION.
MIDDLE EARTH’S MAESTRO Valdez also headed the animation department at Weta Digital for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
with 3D software,” Valdez adds. “There’s still a barrier to entry because it’s all so complicated, but it’s an exciting time in the technology evolution.” Asking someone what cameras they used to film a tiny world created digitally is an abstract question. However, Valdez says “as a live-action person”, it’s a critical one. “When we began exploring and camera testing, I wanted it to feel like a normal-size camera operator was on the ground trying to film tiny people,” he explains. “But when you do that it’s actually quite distracting in that you become aware of the camera in the wrong way. It becomes hard to be with the characters in the moment. My personal aesthetic with camera is that I rely a little bit more on cuts than camera moves. I keep the camera relatively simple so that it’s like an animator’s point of view – there’s a focus on shot choices and moving from shot to shot in order to generate the camera energy, rather than having longer takes with a lot of camera movement in them.” However, Valdez exaggerated the depth of field to make the world feel small. “Because it’s digital, we would work in a ‘normal space’ but have a super- exaggerated, shallow depth of field as if we were doing more of a macro feeling,” he says. “That depth of field was very testing on their software for rendering final images. The guys at Epic had to do some development to get their brand-new render mode that they have in Unreal – it’s called Path Tracer. It means it bounces light around legitimately and gives you that lovely, real lighting feeling.” You can watch Brave Creatures on YouTube
CUTTING EDGE The shallow-depth-of-field aesthetic that was used to sell the small size of the characters made full use of a new path-tracing rendering mode that had just been developed for Unreal
55. AUGUST 2023
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