Beans

Cinesite makes some noise with its hilarious short film as it looks to a future with animated content.

Beans is a short, cheeky, 50-second film with an unexpected ending.

Written and directed by Animator Alvise Avati, it was completed by the London-based team at Cinesite, who were behind the visual effects on World War Z, Skyfall, Iron Man 3 and many other major productions. The studio recently completed work on 300: Rise of an Empire, Jack Ryan, Into The Storm and The Monuments Men. The short features high-quality modeling, texturing and technical effects, but most importantly, it demonstrates the expected high standard of the Cinesite animation team.

According to Managing Director Antony Hunt, over the past few months, the group has been looking at ways of developing and showcasing the skills they have in-house. Animated content is a potential business area that we have been interested in for some time, he adds.

Says Animation Director Eamonn Butler, Developing our own content gave us creative control and proved to be an invaluable way to show what the Cinesite team is capable of. I see shorts and in-house projects like this as essential to our creative development, and its something we are committed to. Weve had a lot of fun making Beans, and I hope people have as much fun watching and sharing it.

Click here to see Beans and the Making of Beans video.

Here, Director Alvise Avati and Producer Eamonn Butler discuss the project Beans. What was the initial premise for Beans, and how did you come up with the idea?

Avati: Ive always been interested in commercials, and this was a way of building my portfolio and developing ideas. What I love about the commercial format is the discipline required to tell a story in just 25 to 30 seconds. Good commercials are like short films; they are a great way to communicate ideas quickly and persuasively.

I was working with Cinesite at the time I was developing the initial idea.

Butler: What appealed to me immediately about Beans was the opportunity for Cinesite to be creative and generate our own content. Alvise had created an animatic by this stage, while he was working with us on Edge of Tomorrow. I knew straight away that it would be perfect for what we were looking to do. Beans is self-contained, short and funny. It could also be completed in a relatively short time frame, so it ticked every box for us. With the skills we have here, I knew we could add great production value and have a lot of fun making it.

We began work in May 2013 and finished it at the end of October.

What concept was there for the look? Was there a specific style you were hoping to achieve?

Butler: Alvise had gathered loads of photographic reference for the look of the astronauts, like NASA photographic footage of the moon landing. He also had some cool jumping off points in terms of the creature design. We jumped straight into designing the creature in a very collaborative way. Alvise was sculpting, I was adjusting, and the whole team had some involvement in generating the look.

How was the alien monster designed? What influences did you use?

Butler: We always knew we wanted him to be big, bipedal, with short, stocky arms and a little head (not too intelligent looking!), but it took us a while to settle on his color. We attempted versions in brown and gray, which blended in too much with the environment. VFX Supervisor Richard Clarke pushed the chroma toward bright red, with a crustacean reference. This was more exciting, but did not sit in the plate well. We added a lot of dirt and dust on the creatures skin, which really helped integrate it into the environment. We settled on a less-saturated red color, so the creature looked suitably alien and other-worldly.

The monsters face is surrounded by mandibles, which are closed when we first see him. When he roars, everything opens up and his mouth looks shocking and big. The gag here was to make his roar as dramatic as we possibly could. When we first see the creature, his mouth looks small because its hidden by the mandibles; but when he roars, his mandibles open up and flap around, revealing a massive gaping maw filled with moving claws. We also added a biological luminescence to the inside of the mandibles to draw attention to his mouth when it opened.

Avati: We see the creature quite briefly, and we were aware that the detail in him could get lost. I had initially wanted his eyes to glow, particularly when he comes out of the shadows at the start. In the end, we added bioluminescence effects to his head to make him stand out.

The monster moves quickly. He crushes the first spaceman, rips the second and crushes the third, but we were concerned not to make the violence too graphic. We softened the effect by covering the astronaut victims with dust and debris. This also added to the creatures overall sense of power, as a huge cloud of dirt explodes every time he slams his fists down on the astronauts.

How much space research did you need to do?

Avati: We looked at NASA footage as a reference for astronauts moving with low gravity. We also referenced the speed of movement and the weight of real dust on the moon. We referenced Lunar Rover footage, which was very useful. We were interested in how motion is affected by gravity. In Beans, the astronauts move very slowly, which is very close to reality and what we would expect to see on the lunar surface.

Unlike the spacemen, the monsters movement is not inhibited by gravity issues. This was a creative decision to have the astronauts impeded by the lower gravity but not the monster. We needed him to look huge, weighty and powerful as he utterly destroys the astronauts.

Butler: At the start of the short, the environment needed to be a realistic representation of the moons surface. We establish the context of the film as almost documentary-like. Then we flip t

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