The winning video team for CGSociety’s EON CGChallenge tells their production story.
The CGSociety launched its 20th CGChallenge 'EON - World Within Worlds' in October 2006. These CGChallenges have now become the world's largest and most successful series of digital art competitions.
“Over the last few challenges there has been more narrative and technical guidance, and in the EON CGChallenge we introduced the Film Trailer category,” says Dr. Mark Snoswell, CGSociety President. “We also invited in two of the world's leading Science Fiction writers and based the challenge on one of their blockbuster novels - EON, by Greg Bear.” The Grand Prize winning team was from Italy, calling themselves ‘The Shift’. Here is their production story.
When the SHIFT team, Emiliano Colantoni, Gianfranco Sgura, Marco Stellabotte and David Bonelli first floated the idea of joining the EON Challenge, two of their number were in the middle of the most painful decisions in their professional lives.
Emiliano and Gianfranco were having meetings; planning a strategy for successfully leaving the studio they were working for and starting a new company.
“One of the steps we were evaluating at the time,” explains Emiliano, “was making a reel out of our best work and starting to contact companies and agencies. The kind of activity one would normally do before stepping out.”
At the end of November last year, they spotted the EON Challenge on the CGSociety forums. The decision wasn’t an easy one. However, after a long discussion, they gave away the idea of putting together the reel and went instead for 18-20 hour days to generate the movie trailer.
After a week studying the instructions and the inspiration pages on CGTalk, they began sketching the concepts for the characters, the ships, and other elements in the trailer, and submitted their first entry: ‘The Stone.’ Moving from the concept to the modelling stage required a more intensive process, “and we realized, OK, if we want to make this thing work, we have to quit our day jobs, which we did,” said Emiliano.
The Shift crew never had the chance to read the novel. Gianfranco Sgura takes up the story. “We really appreciate the efforts put in by the CGTalk staff in creating the inspiration page,” says Sgura. “That has been revealed to be a very complete and fulfilling source. We also enjoyed the power of Wiki where we've found very useful outlines.”
Preproduction became the most important thing to have time for, “however, having joined the EON Challenge two months after the official beginning,” explained Emiliano, “we knew we couldn't afford losing too much time exploring concepts and scripts, so we decided to limit ourselves to 20 days on designs and writing the story. That way we could jump into the production phase and be really fast. The two weeks extension CGTalk gave out has been like a divine gift!”
Emiliano had studied comics for several years so he became the main concept artist and director. He designed all the characters, the various environments, and the storyboards. To lighten his payload, Gianfranco designed the space ships, and the character Patricia's house. Marco Stellabotte was in charge for modeling the shuttle launch base and later for being an ultra-patient rotoscope-artist.
The Shift team had decided to make a trailer like a short movie. One that told a story, but left the audience wanting to know what happened next. “We started sketching at a furious pace, searching for ideas and never caring how dirty the drawings became,” explains Emiliano. “Truly, the first sketches on the storyboard were so dirty, it was almost impossible to understand them!”
There was also a 90 second limit to the story, so they scanned through the rough storyboard and edited an animatic. To give a first, rough soundtrack, they grabbed pieces of similar cinematic trailers. The animatic was important for two reasons: to decide the length of the scenes, and to see if the leap from storyboard to film worked. As they went along, they swapped in the storyboard drawings, to see if everything fitted together correctly.
