VFX 2022 - TRAP | STUDENT PROJECTS

PITCH / TEASER

A noble man, Aleck, is mourning his wife, Anya, in a cemetery. Leaving, he hears a whisper voice leading into the nearby forest.

He goes but can’t find her. The voice leads him into the darkest side of the forest to a mausoleum.

Inside the mausoleum, a stair leads to an underground crypt, where he’s finally reunited with is beloved wife. But suddenly, she turns herself into an hideous spider monster and eats him.

MOVIE

He is our main character, he is a noble man from the XVIth century in Poland, while mourning his wife Anya, he is lured into a dark forest by her voice.

He is a deeply depressed character and completely blinded by the wish to see his wife again.

CHARACTERS

Anya is Aleck deceased wife, they loved each other deeply even after death. She wants to see him again and when they are finally reunited she revealed her true identity.

Her name means "a net" in polish. It's an horrible spider monster who takes the appearance of the deceased to lure people into her lair.

To hunt she has the ability of morfing her body into the shape she wishes. That's why she lives near a cemetery:
the perfect place to chose her victim and impersonate their dear ones.

For the animation, we went at a motion capture studio (Mocap Lab) and worked with profesionnals to bring our characters to life.

Then we cleaned the files that we received and added expressions to our characters faces. The only character without motion capture was Siatka, that's why she was fully animated by one of us.

We were given access to an autorig for our human characters and made the Siatka from scratch.

We sculpted blendshapes into Zbrush and put them in a facial setup, it allowed the animators to controled the expressions.

For our characters we simulate the clothes in marvelous designer to make a more realistic render for our characters.

ENVIRONMENT

This is the place where our main character appear at the beginning, we wanted to make a warm atmosphere to bring a melancholic feeling. It makes a contrast with the next environment and help us create an interesting duality of ambiance.

For the forest we wanted to make a change in the atmosphere to create a grim ambiance and to introduce the horror part of the movie. Hence we choose to make a blue atmosphere with a lot of fog.

This crypt is part of an ancient cemetery, forgotten since a long time and hidden deeply in a gloomy forest, this place has become the spider's lair. It is dark, decaying and cold place with an oppressive atmosphere.

The assets are made of stone, damaged by time and weather, some parts of the vaults have collapsed allowing water to seep in and moss to grow.
The crypt is only lit by the light from the collapsed vault and the stairs.

Since it's the lair of our monster it as a lot of corpses and skeletons of different species.

In Wnyki the constraint for the fx was to have a realistic feel. For some fx a certain magical feeling was needed. The fx were created in Houdini then placed and rendered in 3dsmax with the Vray rendering engine. For the FX we based them on our research related to fantasy and horror cinema.