2010-2012 Showreel

showreel2012 from amy brutton on Vimeo.

The Gathering Dusk - Trailer

The gathering dusk Trailer from GatheringDuskTeam on Vimeo.

Elements of Storyboard

Eleanore - Character Design

Creating Eleanore was a bit of a challenge; from the start I had decided she should be based on one of the silent movie starlettes, since I imagined her acting in a similar manner, though not quite so overstated. I began by working from photos of the likes of Louise Brooks to get a base, until I reached something I was more or less satisfied with. The idea was that at first glance she should come across as a frail little thing, put upon by circumstance, a classic, albeit faded, English beauty, the stereotypical colonial wife. Naturally, however, her character could not end there; she needed some bite, some substance, which is were the angles in her face came into play, her pointed chin and defined jawline. In the final tweaks (which occured when the character was more or less fully modelled) I brought her eyes slightly closer together, and lengthened her chin. Minor Hairfarm details such as her rather long, dark eyebrows enabled me to give her more structure, and make her more atypical. The rest was left up to her acting.

Eleanore - final render and texture maps

Skin rendering is something of an obsession of mine. It comes as a close-second to modelling, and would be on a par if it weren't for the frustration of render times. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted Eleanore's skin to look like, how I wanted it to react to light and so on, but at the time of production, the Vray Fast SSS 2 shader, which I had decided to use since I wanted to be sure that I was not foregoing any interesting options by choosing the simpler Fast SSS, was fairly undocumented, so it was a matter of (a lot of) trial and error. I had already used it in another short I had produced in my 4th year, but the results, in hindsight, were unsatisfactory, and I knew there were quite a few things I had failed to grasp. It is still definitely not perfect, but I am getting there. At the top of my list of things I wanted to get right was translucency, and lots of it. This is the legacy of working in scanline and trying to get round the desperate plaster-like opacity of it's shaders. In keeping with her delicate features, and the contrast between her colorings and those of her surroundings, I wanted her skin to seem almost paper-thin at times, and not remotely suited to harsh sunlight. With that in mind I spent a lot of time fiddling around with the Scatter Radius and SSS Color Texture maps, and ended up painting a complete map of veins on Zbrush, with an anatomy book as reference for accuracy (in order to be able to go into deeper detail, I divided her uvs into 5 "plates", so these, naturally, are only the textures for her head and neck).

Eleanore - Modelsheets and Topology

EleanoreWireframeTurn from amy brutton on Vimeo.

Posing by Alexia Rubod of our Making Of team

Eleanore's wardrobe

I was responsible for the cloth simulations on the film. Although I am not of a very "technical" disposition, this appealed to me, since it meant that I was fully responsible for the characters as a whole, from their design to the way their clothes moved. My only regret is that I did not study the latter, before the former. That is to say, I sculpted the clothes in Zbrush, complicated folds and all, and then recreated the topology to make it "low-poly", supposing that this might "help" the simulation. It did not. Moreover, since these were my first tentative steps into the world of cloth simulation (steps that often seemed to be taken in very wet sand) it took me a while to understand that the problem did not lie simply in my settings, but in the mesh itself. Fortunately, once I had figured this out, and remodelled and retextured all the clothes accordingly, it all went swimmingly. Unfortunately, before I figured this out, before I even started testing the simulations, I created two completely different dresses for Eleanore, until I was satisfied with her appearance. I dearly hope this is the only character I ever model who can boast superfluous clothes. But at least I learnt quite a bit about Zbrush - and more importantly, I learnt that if I know that somewhere towards the end of production lies a task I know nothing about, I should do some very pre-emptive dabbling before launching into the production of elements which may then turn out to be useless.