Lighting like Fincher

Work on lighting began early in Blur’s lookdev process, which involved refining the aesthetic of each sequence before assets were made. “Fincher is keenly aware of the practicality of different textures, surfaces, and materials, and the physics of how they react to light in the real world,” said Compositing Supervisor at Blur, Nitant Ashok Karnik. “His eye for color is insanely precise. For example, when we were establishing lighting for the ship’s cargo hold, Fincher specified that he only wanted oil lanterns and moonlight – specifically 1,800K and 4,000K respectively. And of course, they were all spot-on in look and feel.”

As well as lighting and color, Fincher was also very intentional about how the audience should feel during key scenes. The sunset in the story, for instance, had to look ugly with greenish hues reminiscent of Se7en. Meanwhile, the ship where the film takes place had to feel disgusting, with a dark cargo hold below deck that would feel hellish and dank – exactly the kind of place the story’s crustacean monster would be found.

“We worked hard to make these characters feel like they were in a horrible, wretched place, and to make the audience feel as uncomfortable as the characters looked,” said Karnik. “We also played with lighting on the characters. For the antihero, Torrin, our art director had the idea of using a 50/50 lighting style, where only half his face was lit. Conceptually, we thought this lighting mirrored how morally gray his behavior was. You can see this transition from the beginning of the short, where the light wraps across Torrin’s face, to the end where he’s murdered his entire crew and his face is half-lit.”

Swaying the sea

Being able to create a realistic, horrifying seascape was also key to ensuring the final animation felt immersive. To do this, the Blur Studio team used V-Ray’s infinite VRayPlane to define the horizon lines throughout each sequence.

“Everything in Bad Travelling happens on a boat at sea,” said Cambier. “This represents a relatively contained space, so we knew that our representation of parallax and scale was key to making the final render look realistic.”

Once the horizon lines were defined, the team had to create the illusion of constant swaying from the ocean’s waves, which had to be checked in animation previews. There were two ways to do this: sway the whole boat and all the characters on it, as well as the cloth and hair; or simply move everything around the boat to give the illusion of swaying.

“The choice was quickly made to sway all that is around the boat, as it would have been a nightmare to animate everything happening on the deck,” said Cambier. “Using the VRayPlane was essential for this too. It allowed us to do some simple coding to include and snap that infinite ocean in all our renders, from animation to lighting all the way to the final comp.”

Delivering in record time

Despite having just six months to deliver 386 shots, the Blur Studio team was able to complete Bad Travelling on schedule by optimizing their workflow. “Chaos have been our partners in crime for a very long time. Even David Fincher’s relationship with V-Ray goes way back: his video for ‘Only’ by Nine Inch Nails (created with Digital Domain) was the first time V-Ray’s photorealistic ray tracing was used in a commercial project,” said Cambier.

“For a studio like Blur, each new version of V-Ray has a shorter render time, which is really a game changer. We can either decide to render our shows faster, therefore allowing us to move faster between projects, or we can decide to push our quality, by turning on features like shutter imperfections, caustics, or textures in fog. Either way, we have more power to keep a show within its original scope and schedule, giving artists time to find a healthy work/life balance, without making any sacrifices on the quality of our final render.”

To read an in-depth interview with the Blur Studio team, check out the Chaos blog.