Car Crash - Freeze Frame

Our main ispiration for this work was the The Blues Brothers‘ chase scene.

We concluded that the best way to tell our story was to surprise the viewer thanks to a sequence shot that leads the audience through this progressively chaotic scene.

To spice up the freeze frame we decided to give our cinematic a comic look. Moreover, it helped us to justify the weirdness of the scene. We’ve used two post process materials: one for the cel-shading effect, and another for the comic effect.

We started by doing a previs in Photoshop and in Maya, to have a preview of the camera movement, and also to decide which assets we needed.

Then, we started looking up the assets. We took lots of them from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, and from Sketchfab. After that we modeled the few things we didn't find online such as: the luggage, the dollars, the hat of the policeman and the cars' broken glasses.

Meanwhile, we started doing the post process materials.

We wanted to give our scene a cel-shading effect. So we operated on the shadows. We created a post process material that gave the toon effect. We started by doing a lighting mask, that we used to change the look of the shadows. Then, we put some parameters that allowed us to change the treshold of the shadow steps, to change the color of the shadow, and to decide which of the actors in scene apply this effect on.

Here is a showcase video.

After that, we created the other post process material. We wanted to achieve a comic effect by putting some white dots in the lighting areas, and some black lines in the shadow areas. Again, we started from a lighting mask, that we used to decide where to put the dots and the lines. Then, we created the white dots with a texture, and the black lines by doing math operations on the Texture Coordinate node. We created parameters in order to be able to modify the size of the dots and of the lines, their intensity, and the size of their areas. Finally, we duplicated this process, to be able to create two layers of dots and lines, to achieve different intensities.

Here is another showcase video.

Here are the breakdowns. They show at first the scene without any post process material activated, than with the cel-shading effect, and finally adding the comic effect.

In the meantime, we started the set dressing of the scene. The people and the assest on the sidewalk were coherently placed in order to create micro-situations. Particularly, the garbage was painted using the foliage mode, and the traffic was studied with a series of previs. We used New York's roads as references to create an environment similar to a realistic metropolis.

For the characters in the cars, we created them in Metahuman.

Finally, we completed the scene by adjusting the lighting  and setting the camera movement (which we had a draf of that we did in the previs).

At the end, we added some dynamic lines, modeled in Maya, in order to reinforce the comic look.

Here is how we split the work.

Art director: Porta Martina.

Previz: Buonanotte Domenico, Chiodo Federico, Fumagalli Alberto, Garcea Martina, Lambo Mirko, Porta Martina.

Modeling & texturing: Buonanotte Domenico, Fumagalli Alberto, Garcea Martina, Lambo Mirko, Porta Martina.

Post process: Fumagalli Alberto, Garcea Martina.

Set dressing: Buonanotte Domenico, Chiodo Federico, Lambo Mirko, Porta Martina.

Lighting: Porta Martina.

Camera movement: Lambo Mirko.

Creating Metahuman: Buonanotte Domenico, Chiodo Federico.

Thank's for your attention!