Pre-production

I participated in meetings with the production team to discuss how we could execute this project in the most practical way possible. In short, there was no budget or time to remove the actor’s tracking points in post-production, so I suggested that since the camera was stationary, it would be possible to track the actor’s head more simply, as long as he was instructed to keep his head as still as possible, moving only his mouth. This is humanly impossible, but I could stabilize his head in post so that only the mouth moved in a way that looked natural (which also made sense since he would be “frozen”). The proposal was accepted, but during testing, we decided to keep a slight natural movement to add more dynamism. I achieved this with 2D tracking plus 3D noise animation softly applied in the render, which combined created an apparent natural movement.

In this project, there was no budget or schedule for simulations. Therefore, in pre-production, I proposed that the ice breaking be done with modeling plus animation in After Effects, and that the ice smoke effects also be created in After Effects by combining footage and compositing.

Render

For this project, I chose to use Corona Renderer instead of Redshift, which I usually use for animations. Corona performs better with refractions than Redshift. The render time was absurdly longer, but the result was far superior and I was able to achieve a pleasing outcome much faster than if I had used Redshift. I have experience rendering ice with Redshift, and it is truly frustrating (especially if it’s frosted).