Miniature Cinema

It was a real treat to work with talented cinematographer and friend Yuta Okamura on this showcase for the awesome miniature set at Marbling Fine Arts in Tokyo. The atmosphere and realism resulting from the details and cinematography are truly something special.

Yuta's idea was to have lightning strike one of the buildings and cause a dreamlike and sureal explosion where as the building shatters and explodes we see gold liquid explode out of the cracks and for this I used Houdini simulations, rendered and composited with the shots of the miniature set.

This was an early test I did which gave me confidence that shining a bright volumetric light from inside the cracks would be a good look. Below are some more stills of the same lighting approach applied later on in the process.

I found that drawing patterns to inform the rbd material fracture approach in Houdini resulted in more interesting fractures especially as it started to split open.

I liked the look of the vellum based fluid getting pushed through the cracks and forming lots of different organic fluid shapes. Here the fluid started as simple geometric shapes but because of the interaction with the fractures it ended up getting split into lots of very natural and varied shapes.