Soup of the Day

Monoculture

mon•o•cul•ture
noun
the cultivation of a single crop in a given area.

Monoculture, a new short film from director Jason Cuddy for Screen East and the UK Film Council, is a story about a man (Daniel Ainsleigh) with no joy until he grows a magical plant that brings colour and happiness into his world. Polaris Digital (well me really) have provided 32 visual effects shots for this short film. Our task was to provide a computer generated plant to several key shots throughout the film, with one catch - we only had two weeks to complete the 32 shots.

Impossible? Not if you’re us. I got very busy early on in the production advising the director and producer how they needed to shoot the scenes so that our work would be easier. During January the production shot the ten-minute film in Suffolk at the same airfield where Space Cadets (Channel 4) was shot two years ago.

Once the production wrapped, Polaris Digital received the rushes within a week and we got busy matching the cameras in 3D space to the real world. This proved to be harder than first expected as we only got half of the camera data we required, but using other objects we managed to get a good approximation of the cameras position. Where it got harder was where the camera moved and the plant moved. Unfortunately there was no way to track the plant with our current software, but PF Hoe 2 Pro (from The Pixel Farm) proved to be invaluable for providing the camera data.

After two weeks of long nights and many thousand cups of tea, the first renders began arriving out of the render farm and taken into Shake and Combustion for Compositing and Colour Timing respectively.

Monoculture will be shown in the summer at the Screen East annual show and currently BBC Four are interested in screening it in the autumn.