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This is a project we worked on this fall for the Pacific Northwest Ballet. After nearly 30 years of performing a production designed by "Where the Wild Things Are" illustrator Maurice Sendak, Pacific Northwest Ballet unveiled their new production featuring the artwork of 'Olivia' illustrator Ian Falconer. At Straightface Studios we were tasked with creating an opening animation to play during the ballet's overture which in other productions is often simply a curtain and set the mood for the rest of the Ballet. As the film would finish the animation projected onto a scrim would would be faded out while the stage lights brought up to reveal the real stage aligned with the final frame of the animation.
Trees were created in SpeedTree from scratch. The forest was layed out in ForestPack Pro and finally it was rendered in Vray. Compositing was done in Nuke using deep render passes in order to allow us to iterate on the snow renders as well as composite in the FumeFX smoke stacks (which were scanline rendered as cards in Nuke) as well as various atmospheric touches as deep passes. Unfortunately we weren't able to render the volume lights as Deep due to a bug in VRay 3.0 (which has since been fixed).
https://vimeo.com/154377903
This is a project we worked on this fall for the Pacific Northwest Ballet. After nearly 30 years of performing a production designed by "Where the Wild Things Are" illustrator Maurice Sendak, Pacific Northwest Ballet unveiled their new production featuring the artwork of 'Olivia' illustrator Ian Falconer. At Straightface Studios we were tasked with creating an opening animation to play during the ballet's overture which in other productions is often simply a curtain and set the mood for the rest of the Ballet. As the film would finish the animation projected onto a scrim would would be faded out while the stage lights brought up to reveal the real stage aligned with the final frame of the animation.
Trees were created in SpeedTree from scratch. The forest was layed out in ForestPack Pro and finally it was rendered in Vray. Compositing was done in Nuke using deep render passes in order to allow us to iterate on the snow renders as well as composite in the FumeFX smoke stacks (which were scanline rendered as cards in Nuke) as well as various atmospheric touches as deep passes. Unfortunately we weren't able to render the volume lights as Deep due to a bug in VRay 3.0 (which has since been fixed).
https://vimeo.com/154377903
We were honored to be asked by the Pacific Northwest Ballet to create an opening video for the new version of The Nutcracker by George Balanchine featuring original designs by 'Olivia' illustrator Ian Falconer.
The animation is played live during Tchaikovsky’s Overture to open the show and takes you through an 1880’s New England forest, a small town, and finally arrives at the Stahlbaum house where you join up with some unexpected little visitors.
"Another production change comes during the overture, which here involves an impressive video animation by Straightface Studios."
The Wall Street Journal
"The effect is enchanting; at intermission a number of patrons were heard to say they’d go back again just to see the video."
Seattle Post Intelligencer
"A magical mood is established straightaway with a video from local firm Straightface Studios..."
Seattle Times
The animation is played live during Tchaikovsky’s Overture to open the show and takes you through an 1880’s New England forest, a small town, and finally arrives at the Stahlbaum house where you join up with some unexpected little visitors.
"Another production change comes during the overture, which here involves an impressive video animation by Straightface Studios."
The Wall Street Journal
"The effect is enchanting; at intermission a number of patrons were heard to say they’d go back again just to see the video."
Seattle Post Intelligencer
"A magical mood is established straightaway with a video from local firm Straightface Studios..."
Seattle Times
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