Alright, this is the story. The main character is walking along after the storm when suddenly he is surrounded by flying demonish-creatures. He falls to the ground and the creatures attack him, clinging to his skin and clothes. To find out how he gets out of the situation, take a look at the script.

In order to have a creature, the creature has to be made! Several different forms were considered. The easy way would've been to create a sort of silhouette with beady eyes. But Peter preferred having a real-looking, creature with enough detail to see the bumps in the skin. Of course it still had to be dark and creepy and would still have beady, red eyes. There was also the issue of whether to make a flying or crawling creature. Originally a crawling creature was being planned, but then it occurred to Peter and Micah that it would be difficult to make crawling creature intimidating enough, and it would be much more difficult to make a crawling creature than a flying one because creatures on the ground would require very accurate tracking and animation to make them stick.

So, a detailed, flying creature was written into the script and planned on. Eventually, it's design was thought up and modeling began. There were actually no drawings of this guy before he was started on (partly because neither Peter nor Micah are very talented in drawing).

You can see a rough outline of the modeling process above, left to right. The nose was the starting place and then the eye was circled. Part of the cheek followed and then the horn. The jaw was modeled and the beginning of the neck. Then the horn was circled and the polygons merged with the top of the head to form the back of the head. The polys around the whole base were then organized and extruded to form the neck. It was then extruded further downward to form the rib cage and tail. The arm was modeled separately and welded to the body. Then the flappy part of the wing was modeled out of the body and arm. Finally the eyes, teeth and bones (for animation) were added. Tada, the modeling is done!

Notice that only half of the model was actually modeled, the other half was simply a mirrored-version of the first half.

But, before it was ready for animation, it had to be surfaced (a fancy way of saying that it had to be painted). Pieces of the surface were UV mapped to make a sort of flat picture of the mesh. This was used like a map in Photoshop to paint the colors, bump textures and specularity (shininess) maps. The scaly look was created with Photoshop's paintbrush tools and the "Plastic Wrap" effect. All aspects of the character were created/painted, nobody elses meshes or textures were used.

Here is the finished model! You can see the complete, mirrored mesh, along with the painted textures.

The next step was animation. One of the slick features of Lightwave 7.5 is the ability to do nonlinear animation. Basically this means that different parts of an animation can be made separately and then combined later. Above, you can see the animation of the different parts of the wings and the tail to make a flapping motion. Basically the wings move in circles - down, in, back, up, forward, out, down... something like that. This wasn't sourced from bats or anything, it was just kind of a logical flapping pattern!

Here is the animation path of the creature. The silly-looking guy is just a stand in for the main character. As you can see, the creature flies in from the right, around twice and then out the left. At the bottom you can see the two layers of animation - the flapping and motion.

On to the compositing process! In After Effects 5.5 (can't afford 6 yet), the original video footage is being prepared for the creatures to be added. But adding the creatures isn't the only thing that had to be done, the shot also had to be changed to nighttime. It has been found that changing out the sky is the single most important thing in changing day to night, so first the color of the sky was selected and erased. Then a painted sky was inserted behind it.

Then Matt was roughly selected and separated onto another layer. Selecting things like this is always the single most time-consuming thing in a composite like this... so this took forever! There was a reason, luckily - the creatures had to pass behind Matt.

Enter the Dragons! Or rather, the flying demons. There are three in the scene and they each were rendered separately to allow them to be individually arranged in the scene. As you can see, they were rendered with motion-blur. In AE, they were also given the blur of the camera motion.

And here's their shadows! This is obviously a different time in the shot. The large shadow is being cast on Matt, hence the outline of Matt that custom-cuts the shadow. That shadow is actually just a copy of the creature with its colors and size changed to make it look like a shadow.

The three small shadows were rendered on a flat, white ground plane (a big square stuck under the model in the 3d scene) and were cut out and put in the scene.

Here are the layers mixed together...

And here is the final shot! It's compared with the original footage so you can see the change. Big change, huh?

Take a look at the Preview to see the completed effect in motion!

If you enjoyed looking through this, let me know! Hey, if you hated it with a wicked passion, let me know that too!