Stephen Tolfrey creates a miniature paper version of the critically acclaimed band using CINEMA 4D, by Steve Jarratt
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When Belle And Sebastian decided to cover The Primitives 1988 song Crash for a Late Night Tales mix album, the label turned to Stephen Tolfrey to create the accompanying video. Since the band members werent going to be featured in the video, Stephen decided to create stylized versions of them. "I listened to the track and the mellow vibe suggested a nice simple band performance in contrast to a fairly chaotic background," he says. "So I decided to make paper toy versions of the band against real, photographed street scenes."
The idea was that a miniature version of the band, playing against frantic city scenes, would go unnoticed by people in their busy lives. Although the brief was completely open, Stephen kept in regular contact with Late Night Tales and the band, to ensure no last minute surprises. "I always provide as much work-in-progress as possible," he says, "so the client is happy with the progress and then cant make dramatic changes towards the end. I drew up a production schedule and sent the latest work at key stages of the project."
The band members were presented as if made from paper, complete with folded edges and animated features. "Because the paper people could be a little crude, this allowed me to make fairly lo-res polygon models and not worry too much about accuracy," Stephen explains. "The hardest thing was to make a perfect cube look folded and hand-made around the edges."
To help composite the miniature band into the live-action photography he actually made physical paper models and took them around London. "I took shots of them in situ and used that as lighting reference. I also scanned in each of their flat areas and re-mapped that onto the 3D models to achieve a more hand-made and folded look and feel."
The project relied heavily on CINEMA 4Ds character animation tools, which Stephen praises for their "simplicity of setup, to rig and animate the paper band. To create the facial animation, Stephen filmed himself lip-synching to the track. He then imported this footage into Adobe After Effects and created animations over the top. These sequences were then texture-mapped onto the characters faces in CINEMA 4D. Making sure he had the right lip-sync section for each scene was one of the hardest parts of the task, admits Stephen.
Lighting played a big part in ensuring the CG elements tallied with the live-action. To help with this, Stephen shot background plates at each location and used them to light the relevant scenes using CINEMA 4Ds global illumination. "The speed is good, the quality is awesome" Stephen enthuses. To help control look of the final footage, he rendered out the diffuse, ambient occlusion, GI and shadow passes and composited it all in After Effects using the CINEMA 4D-After Effects connectivity. Incredibly, Stephen shot all the time-lapse photography on a locked-off camera, and did all the compositing manually, without the use of any match-moving software. The slow camera pans and zooms were all done digitally in post.
With over three minutes of lip-synched animation, Stephen admits that hitting the deadline was tough. His main machine is a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 iMac with 16GB RAM, and to get the production done within his two-month schedule, Stephen was rendering day and night, using spare machines to help with the workload.
The video for Crash was all completed using CINEMA 4D, which Stephen found perfectly adequate. "My workflow was fairly low-res," he confides, "but Id still like to upgrade to R14 nonetheless. After migrating from XSI a couple of years ago, Ive always found CINEMA 4D just a joy to use. Its really easy and intuitive, has great rendering, and the transition to and from After Effects for me is amazing. Plus its available on a Mac!"
Please note that some of the images are of the physical models Stephen made of the band, not the CG ones!
Steve Jarratt is a long-time CG enthusiast and technology journalist based in the UK.
Stephen Tolfrey Website:
www.stephentolfrey.com
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Stephen Tolfrey creates a miniature paper version of the critically acclaimed band using CINEMA 4D, by Steve Jarratt
