Halloween Special

 In Blog

As you may know today it’s Halloween and after I saw this amazing artwork I wanted to share with you as a Halloween Special post.

After their success with Suckablood they just launched a new short movie with zero budget, and it’s called “The Green Ruby Pumpkin”. It was created by two passionate senior visual effects artists: Miguel Ortega and Tran Ma. Working at the zero budget scale of things, they quickly realised that what they needed is a ample supply of VFX knowledge which they already had:

Every shot has a visual effect of some sort, the only thing we built was a 12×12 deck and a 12×12 front porch wall and doorway. This was not because we wanted to be CG crazy but because we couldn’t afford to do it for real, ironically what usually inflates the budget to others is free to us but we couldn’t afford the most basic of props once we ran out of money.

EVERYTHING in the film is handmade when possible, the costumes, the props, the wallpaper is painted by hand with a brush because we couldn’t afford wallpaper, the picture frames were made of cardboard because we had no money for real frames. The only store bought props were the shoes, and the khakis outfits on our triplets. Even the statues on the wall were cast from cheap plaster molds and painted to look old.

The project’s green screen living room setup (combined with the kitchen) proved flexible enough to capture all elements needed for the short except for the fully grown adult wolf — that required the much more up close and personal approach of setting up a green screen in the animal’s cage. 7 hours later it was in the can for the crucial 2 seconds of onscreen time it occupies in the final film. Their human talent were much more compliant, although arguably, the digital prosthetics work rendered onto the witchy Miss Deats made her just as scary as the wolf.

The entire project was rendered on 7 computers, Running Maya for 3D, Mudbox for sculpting, Mari and Mudbox for Texture Painting, Vray for rendering, Nuke for compositing. A lot of shortcuts had to be used in order to manage our render times, including 3d projections in nuke, miniatures, and practical elements. The majority of the vfx work was just us two, however we had great help from friends on the rigging and animation side of things. We wanted to make sure everything you see on screen was designed and or fabricated by our team.

You can also see the project coming together in the making of video:

 

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