Spaceman

Creating the look for the wider views of Chopra required extensive research, from both a technical and a visual standpoint.
Luckily, I could rely on some clever implementation of Mandelbulb that Steffan Lones wrote in Houdini, which I modified to generate asymmetrical weird-looking shapes. Through a series of topological transformations, I twisted and arranged those in a single composition that inspired a sense of mystery and danger.
Thanks to Steffan and Francesco we could render the resulting volumes as fairly hi-res images, which I’ve then processed in Nuke.
The result of these experiments became the base for a very large and detailed matte painting created in Photoshop and finalized in Nuke.
Albeit the scale of Chopra negated any parallax in most shots, I still wanted to implement some tricks to inject some subtle three-dimensional movements.

Once defined the initial look of Chopra from space, I could extend the canvas to create a larger 16K version view which was then used for a number of different shots, including some fictitious satellite photography featured at the beginning of the film.

The Chopra Cloud immense scale, pictured at many different steps of Jakub’s journey, required a lot of work to create images that could feel like a smooth continuous progression from very far to very close.
A bit like a view of something familiar under a microscope, we had the expectation of creating something with a consistent and clear identity, that was presented in an ever-evolving, and sometimes surprising, look.

This shot was inspired by an abstract piece of concept art made by the wonderful MPC Art Department team.
It was the first DMP I’ve started on the show. At that time, I aimed to explore and clarify the visual language we should have used for Chopra, providing a clear and detailed indication to the FX team on the vocabulary of shapes we wanted to use.
The exercise immediately proved to be effective in informing the rest of the crew about what we were supposed to build.
However, using this shot as a playground meant changing it countless times, iterating on every possible aspect, and circling back to it repeatedly, updating it with the latest creative ideas, until the end of the show.
The final shot features a lot of depth and parallax which I’ve implemented in Nuke through several techniques and custom made tools.

Months after the show was delivered, I had an opportunity to rework this shot creating a 16K+ version of it, which was then printed as a massive backdrop for the red carpet event organized by Netflix.

I’ve created the previous shots directly in Photoshop combining renders, 2D elements and some painting.
The layers were then exported in Nuke where I added the camera movement and all sorts of subtle animations.

The layout of this shot was assembled and rendered in Houdini by Francesco Ferraresi using several volume assets produced by the FX team.
I took the render layers and balanced them in Nuke, then imported the result in Photoshop where I worked on creating the look and the missing elements.
Once happy with how the shot looked as a single frame, I exported all layers back to Nuke where I added the camera movement, depth and all sorts of subtle animations.