Stockholm-based studio Bl ck has produced a great deal of eye-catching work in the past, including an award-winning Nike+ campaign with classic black-and-white cartoons designed by French illustrator McBess, and a series of commercials for Electronic Arts fantasy role-playing game, Dragon Age Inquisition. But with
- a live-action short film directed by Andr e Wallin - the team had to take on a very different task altogether: it had to transform its very own backyard into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
State Zero's backdrop is that of Stockholm; a near-future take on the city, plunged into pure dystopia. Aggressive, mutated vampires stalk the land while military teams venture into hazardous zones, attempting to maintain invaluable surveillance towers.
Using captured footage of the city around them, the Bl ck team gave the locale a gritty look, added futuristic architecture, and then filled it with the beasts - all without losing the city's realistic edge.
While the film itself is brief, the scale of the project was large indeed. State Zero required 88 visual effects shots and an array of design work, spread across user interfaces, the WASP aircraft, and much more. But with ftrack in its corner, Bl ck was more than up for the challenge, as the studio could easily track shots across multiple artists and deal with pauses in post-production without losing a beat.
Zero to hero
State Zero is Wallins first directorial effort, but he has impressive credits as a concept artist, working on projects such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Oblivion and Godzilla. Wallin is an old pal of Calle Granstr m, Bl cks lead compositor, so the idea of collaborating on this high-impact short came naturally. Granstr m started working on the project independently, but as the scale grew, the Bl ck team came aboard as well.
Everyone at Bl ck agreed that this was a brilliant opportunity to push our character and VFX work up a notch, with the ambition to make feature film-quality effects without the constraints of regular commercial productions, says Granstr m.
Luckily, their location proved an immediate benefit, as they could capture footage from Stockholm as a basis for shots. Wallin and Granstr m worked together on ground stills and video footage, and collaborated with aerial cinematographer Bj rn Olin to grab clips using a custom-built flying drone.
Since the world of State Zero exists in the aftermath of an event that has left large parts of the world uninhabitable and ghostlike, it was a big effort to paint out and retouch the moving plates, removing cars, people, and other vehicles that existed in the original shots, notes Granstr m. He adds that maintaining the correct scale of items in the world was essential, since the massive atrium and the smaller foliage-draped buildings used the same asset library and had to remain consistent.
Bloodsucking freaks
State Zero's uncanny, vampiric creatures also provided a significant challenge for Bl ck. Not only did they have to build these soft-body humanistic creatures, but they had to stand up to scrutiny, with static shots that revealed the creatures in their entirety. Its always hard to pull off a convincing humanoid performance in CG, especially when the action is subtle as in some of the vampire shots, admits Granstr m.
Luckily, Bl cks sister company Imagination Studios provided convincing motion-capture work for the vampires, while the team put extensive work into their standard bipedal character rig using ZBrush, Maya, Marvelous, Arnold, and Yeti for the muscles, clothes, hair, and skin. The result is impressive, especially considering the twist ending that hints at their real origins in this nightmarish dystopia...
For the WASP - the film's sci-fi take on a troop carrier - the team began with a 2D concept delivered by Wallins fellow Star Wars concept artist, Matt Allsopp. This was then translated into 3D by robotics artist Gavriil Klimov.
Bl ck also designed the user interface elements seen on the WASP and the ground crews gadgets - holographic readouts consisting glowing figures and charts. These elements, along with the environments, creatures and vehicles, meant that Bl ck was tasked with significant creative responsibility. As such, it was absolutely crucial that the team employed a finely tuned project management system to oversee the project. And that's where ftrack comes in...
Managing workloads
Bl ck first used ftrack when it joined the Goodbye Kansas Entertainment Group, which also includes Fido, Imagination Studios, and Infinity Entertainment.
Fidos use of ftrack is well documented, of course: ftrack began life as that studios internal production tracking tool before growing into a commercial product. Fido and Bl ck alike use ftrack for all of their work, and for Granstr m it's an essential part of any post-production process worth its salt.
Its obvious that when doing effects for more than just a couple of shots, you need to have a system that can help you keep track of all versions and revisions, he says. Since we did upwards of 100 shots forState Zero - and with occasional longer periods between work being done due to switching gears or spending time on other commercial work - ftrack was crucial to us during production.
Pontus Garmvild, Bl ck's head of production, believes tools like ftrack are absolutely essential, and not just for 100+ visual effects vendors: As soon as you start doing more than 10 shots or assets, and have a bigger crew, you notice its a train wreck waiting to happen in terms of structure and organization, he explains. If you add on people working remotely, or the project gets chopped up time-wise for to one reason or another, you realize its impossible to work without a proper asset/project management tool like ftrack.
For Bl ck, it's the way in which all of ftrack's features
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Stockholm-based studio Bl ck has produced a great deal of eye-catching work in the past, including an award-winning Nike+ campaign with classic black-and-white cartoons designed by French illustrator McBess, and a series of commercials for Electronic Arts fantasy role-playing game, Dragon Age Inquisition. But with 
