the biker from the black lagoon art book

The Black Lagoon

The Biker from

Group projects are always difficult, it takes an extra level of energy and dedication to work efficiently as a team. At times we worked great as a group and at others times not so great. But from all the ups and downs, I think we have all learnt a lot and with all the negative issues associated with the project come far more positive highlights. Fifteen weeks can seem like a long time, but when it comes to the world of CG, it is a flash. The time has gone quickly and we always knew it would, but despite all these issues I hope we have produced something of great quality that demonstrates our love for the B-Movie genre whilst also displaying our understanding of narrative and CG design. The Biker from the Black Lagoon has been a labour of love, the characters and world we wanted to produce really hit a note and it has been a pleasure to work on the project. Even with all the hard work, arguments and group issues, I’m extremely happy with what I’ve done in 15 weeks. My understand of Maya has dramatically increased and with this my confidence has boosted. Whether successful or not, it is projects such as these that really affect you. You begin to understand the process in a new light and hopefully, with all our problems, we can all go forward with a new confidence.

Jordan Buckner – Project Director

Foreword

Synopsis A biker by the name of Ben Chapman was murdered ten years ago when the town of Black Lagoon was flooded with radioactive water. Aperture Chemicals Ltd were responsible, but now he is back and mutated from the chemical imbalance. After ten years alone at the bottom of the lagoon, the biker has developed into a new creature, one that is lonely and isolated, but also deadly. In an attempt to find company, the creature pulls young women down from the surface to his lair. The disappearance of a local girl leads to divers searching the area, in the process, they disturb the biker from the Black Lagoon and all hell is about to break loose.

The B-Movie Influence

The project itself was a was of developing our knowledge and understanding of the b movie genre. A genre which is often forgotten, but easy to fall in love with. From the very beginning we wanted to make to show our love of b-movies and let it influence our trailer as much as possible. Obviously, our title had a b-movie reference in itself and so looking back a “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” was a great start. But we also wanted to acknowledge a wider selection, from films such as “Motorpsycho” to more modern day film such as “Planet Terror.” We wanted our narrative to reflect a similar style to these films, but also wanted the tone and aesthetic of the film to feel related to the genre. This influenced our decisions from the very beginning and hopefully led to our final trailer carrying that b-movie quality.

Branding and Marketing Creating a brand and identity for our studio took some time, our first ideas didn’t really work. The name and identity needed to reflect the purpose, a young fresh animation studio who plan to create exciting work. So after some thought we all decided on the name “Gremlin Box.” We felt it was playful and original, whilst also reflecting the magical “gremlin” type quality that animation carries. After an array of designs, we settled on a style and logo.

Business Card Design

Marketing the film is obviously a crucial aspect of the pipeline. In order to create an audience we turned to the biggest social networking tool Facebook, and started a page which acted as a blog. The constant updates kept followers informed and always directed them back to our website.

At this stage, we didn’t have any official artwork to release as marketing material. So, in order to help create some buzz around the film we needed to produce a teaser poster. This didn’t have to show a lot, but instead just give an impression of what the film will be like and create some interest in the title.

The art style was key from the very beginning. Without following a style, animated films can become generic in aesthetic and somewhat lost. The art style is often the aspect that binds a film together and this becomes more important with group projects. We all decided that we wanted to follow something dark and stylised, and so looked carefully into “Team Fortress 2” and “Black Water Gospel.” These both have a very heavy stylisation and each seems unique in its look. This would not only reflect our design, but also our modelling and texturing later in the project.

Art Style

These boards demonstrate the first narrative we settled upon. It really took a lot of time to get to this stage but we felt we had something exciting and from here we started to move forward as a group with a lot of confidence.

Storyboard Artist: Jordan Buckner, 2010

We then blocked out colour boards, these highlight the mood and colour tone of each sequence and are used throughout production to make sure all artists are working from the same idea.


In a real studio environment these finalised presented storyboards would be mounted on the walls. It was really important that each artist in the group constantly referred back to the artwork and storyboards in order to get every part of the aesthetic correct.

Presented Storyboards

Digital, Jordan Buckner, 2010

The Biker’s Hut This first piece of artwork was really an exploration into possible style as well as trying to work out what the biker’s house would look like. We later decided to develop it into a bar, but this was a great start to exploring the world. The style felt too strong at this stage, we wanted to tone it down but still keep the unique quality of colour and grit.

Black Lagoon The town of Black Lagoon has been flooded for ten years, it needed to demonstrate the desolated, dark world that the biker now inhabits. This piece of concept art was the first piece that really started to go in the right direction. It felt as though the world was beginning to take shape and this landscape would become the key environment for our trailer.

Black Lagoon Town We hoped that this environment could provide a lot atmosphere for the trailer and set up our final act with its tone and pace. This concept didn’t change much through the entirety of the pipeline, we wanted to capture that still creepy nature of ghost towns whilst also providing a landscape that helped define the time period and setting.

The Biker The design of the biker took a lot of work. Showing a monster in a monster film is often a risky decision and without a solid creature it will fail immediately. In the original narrative we planned to show this character, he had impact and really intensified the horror, but during the production time and group problems led him to be cut from the film. It’s a real shame because it took away a lot from our final act, but hopefully this piece of concept art shows what we could have achieved.

The Diver Most concept art is an attempt to capture an atmosphere or world whilst still providing some form of design for 3d artists to use. This piece doesn’t exactly convey an idea or a design but definitely felt like it captured a mood. It was developed from a storyboard panel and after some development seemed to reflect the fear that we wanted to capture in our character.

Ink Sketches, Adam Bailey. 2010

Ink Sketches, Adam Bailey. 2010

Pencil Sketch, Dave Ratcliffe, 2010

Digital, Dave Ratcliffe, 2010

Creating the World of Black Lagoon This chapter highlights the production of each environment and scene. From the initial models, to final renders.

Black Lagoon Town The first task I took on was attempting to model and create the town of Black Lagoon. It was this environment that needed to grasp the viewer and capture the mood of the trailer in an instant. It took a lot of effort at every stage to get this scene looking right, but I feel the final results work really well.

The modelling of each building went relatively well and the only criticisms seemed to be adding more detail and imperfections. Each building needed to reflect the timeless American environment our film was set in and so I tried to reference photography by Gregory Crewdson.

These images show the initial set up of the town. It developed a lot but from the beginning I wanted to get buildings into place to confirm that they looks correct when put in a world space together.

Laying out UV’s always takes time, and the extra detail made it a lot trickier. However, getting this stage right is crucial so that textures will fit smoothly on the model.

Text

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The texturing is the point at which the models start to come to life. I used photographed textures and images as a base for most of my buildings and then digitally painted over each whilst altering levels and adding effects. Throughout this process it was important to keep in mind the aesthetic and world we were trying to create.

Setting the Scene Getting this environment right wasn’t easy, after hundreds of changes and a vast array of test renders it finally started to look as though part of our world. A lot of extra work would be needed in post production in order to confirm to the audience that they were underwater.

Perfecting the World The lighting and underwater effects took a lot of work to perfect, but hopefully they are successful. These scenes were difficult to perfect and render time increased with every change. However, it all seemed to come together in the end, and after some effective work in Adobe After Effects the underwater effect really took hold.

The Boat is one of our main settings in which we choose to animate our scenes. This particular model is an early stage of development which slowly changed into the model which we used in our final animation. This particular boat draws a lot of it's influence from the boat, “The Orca” which featured in Jaws - AB

The template UV grid which was used as a guideline to line up the UV's on the Boat ready to export into Photoshop ready for the texturing process.

This for me was one of the most challenging things of the whole project. Although I have had a lot of experience in texturing before, I found this boat particularly hard to texture how I envisioned it from the start of the project

I originally wanted the boat to be textures red but that didn't fit into our specific art style. After changing the colour to green, I changed the saturation settings in Photoshop to give it a washed out look, like Team Fortress.

Props: telephone pole Looking at a couple of reference pictures, I worked with Maya to create a few props like this Telephone pole. These small details add a lot to the world, making it feel real and lived in. When I was happy the first Telephone pole I duplicated what I had worked on them until looked like they had been destroyed over time.

Props: Cans Creating cans, for me made the town more believable. I wanted there to be some more litter or garbage within the town. Maybe dropped from the top of the lagoon or just left there before the own had deserted the lonely biker.

When creating the trash can I realized that my skills in using Maya had slightly improved and I was more comfortable using the software. Like usual I used the reference pictures to create a trash can within Maya.

Props: fire hydrant Fire hydrants placed around the town also gave the scene a realistic understanding to the town for fire safety. Used old tutorials when I was in need of them to help me with the model .

Using the pictures we had found I decided to make a concept picture of what the lagoon would look like in our vision. The next set of pictures shows how the lagoon was made within the program Photoshop.

From the top left to the bottom right. I tried to keep the painting dark and clear so everything can be noticed. For the rocks (bottom right picture) I used a brush that I made and put on a jitter so wouldn’t get the same requiring rocks within the painting.

After finishing the Concept art, I started on the 3D version of the lagoon. I made a simple mesh of how I imagined the lagoon to look and then worked on it until it resembled the concept art. Here are some starting renders of how the mesh looked like. Starting from the top left and ending to the bottom right. When I was happy with the mesh I started to add trees to the scene. But soon realized that it was too simple and that It need more to the background. So I extended the mesh upwards so that there was more mountains would be shown in background. After doing this I asked Jordan what direction would he like up to shot the cam from?

I think the greatest problem I had with the lagoon scene was not getting the textures to how dark I wanted them to be. These pictures show the progression oh how the scene was edited.

The Female Scientist This character is key to the animation, the audience see the events in the same fear that she feels. Her design had to fit the typical 50’s American look but also needed to be rigged and modelled so that she could be animated fully. She needed to really convey the fear of the situation and also had to lip sync with out voice over.

The modelling process was difficult for a number of reasons. Firstly this was the first character I’d ever modelled from my own design. But also because, making a female head look female is very difficult. For a long time she looked very alien and uncanny, but after a lot of work and advice I finally got her to a stage that fit the design.

In addition, I had to model and rig the face of the character in order for lip sync and facial animation. Luckily, good geometry made this process far easier, but a few errors occurred in the mouth which took some fixing.

I wanted to rig the character carefully and accurately, the better she could move, the easier the group could animate her. This of course took more time but I had pushed myself to get her finished on schedule.

The scene in which the female character speaks shows what the animation could have been like if more effort was put into animating. Adam attempted to lip sync this sequence but it just wasn’t working so I started from scratch and managed to get a good performance out of the character. This really felt like the character was alive, and if we could have achieved this throughout, the final animation would have had a much greater effect.

The Doctor This male character had a great design and we looked forward to seeing him come to fruition. However, various issues along the way meant that he wasn’t rigged in time and so we could not animate him. However, a lot of work went into the modelling stage and it would have been great to see him fully posed and speaking.

It is a real shame that this character never made it to the final animation, he is obviously in various scenes, but the lack of animation on him really takes away from the final outcome. The style and feel of the character was looking really strong and when animated to voice over would have worked great.

The Biker The biker was another character that wasn’t finished in time, this was a huge problem and we had to completely rethink about how the trailer could be cut. I made a decision not to show his character in any light because I felt it took away from the atmosphere. The final outcome of this character didn’t fit the concept art and he wasn’t rigged for animation so we decided to show him in silhouette. This was a huge setback but we tried to work around it.

If we had used the character fully, the lack of detail and finish would have spoilt the horror scenes and so a last minute decision was taken to cut any close ups. It was a real shame to see these two characters unfinished, and I think it really affected our final outcome.

The Diver The diver was perhaps our most successful character in the animation, he didn’t speak or contribute to group scenes, but had to interact with the Black Lagoon town in a similar way to the audience. He didn’t require lip sync, but facial animation would still be needed and his equipment would need to move as he swam.

The model for this character turned out far better than expected, and with a lot of work he really looked like we had imagined. Rigging and skinning seemed easier after doing it on the female character already however, I came across a number of problems that needed fixing. The wrap deformer had issues, as did the eye rig, but after some advice I managed to fix them all. I animated the scenes in which he swam and appeared underwater and was surprised by how easy he was to move and position. If we had worked harder I feel all four characters could have been to this level and our animation would have been far improved due to the greater ability to animate.

We hope you have enjoyed reading about the process we went through in order to complete this animation. There have been problems throughout the project and in all honesty the lack of finish is a real disappointment. However, we have all learnt a lot and hopefully this will affect us positively in future project. Jordan Buckner Project Director

the biker from the black lagoon art book

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