PERSONAL WORK · SCIENCE FICTION
Ancient Ally
Key frames from a longer piece I've been building for a while. A machine that still runs on vacuum tubes, the room it has outlived, and the one person who comes to see it. Everything here is mine end to end — set, character, materials, lighting, camera and grade.
TOOLS
3ds Max · V-Ray · Forest Pack · Photoshop · DaVinci Resolve
ROLE
Concept, modeling, look development, lighting, rendering, post
SCOPE
CGI, motion
01 — THE PREMISE
One room, one machine, one visitor. The computer fills a whole wall in valves and filament light; the rest of the space is a house that was never cleared out — books, rugs, a chandelier, tools left mid-job. The operator sits between the two and has been there long enough to belong to the machine rather than the room.
Nothing in the set is stock: the machine, the robot, the props and the clutter were built for this piece. The point of the project is to work the whole pipeline myself rather than direct it — and to see how far one light source and one hue can carry a story.
02 — KEY FRAMES
Every frame is cut 2.39:1 and lit as if it came off an anamorphic lens: the tube wall is the only real source, so the exposure is set on the filaments and everything else falls where it falls. The green practicals are the only cool light allowed in the film.
03 — INSERTS
The inserts do the world-building the wide shots can't: a toy reindeer left on a terminal, an elephant walking the cable tray, a clamp and some bolts on a stool. Small objects, macro lenses, and the same one-source light.
04 — MOTION
A short cut from the same set, delivered twice: anamorphic for the film, vertical for social. Same render, two framings — the vertical is reblocked rather than cropped, so the tube wall still fills the back of frame.
THE VERTICAL CUT
Reblocked rather than cropped — the camera is moved and the lens changed so the tube wall still fills the back of frame at 4:5, and the operator sits on the upper third where a phone puts him.
05 — HOW IT WAS BUILT
Everything is modeled in 3ds Max and rendered in V-Ray. The tube wall is one instanced valve multiplied across a frame, scattered with Forest Pack so the rows drift out of alignment; the floor clutter, paper and cabling are scattered the same way rather than placed by hand.
Lookdev runs on a checker stage with a chart and two spheres so materials read the same before the red light goes on. The robot gets turntables and clay passes before any texture. Grade and final comp are Photoshop, with the passes kept separate so each frame can be re-lit without re-rendering.
ANAMORPHIC LENS MATCHING
The cameras are not generic renderer cameras. I worked from real-world settings — focal length, T-stop, sensor size, focus distance — to match one specific cinema anamorphic: its oval bokeh, the way highlights stretch and smear toward the edge of frame, the barrel distortion and the slight breathing when focus pulls. That is what the bokeh charts and the lamp-and-bunny tests are for: shooting point sources at different distances and stops until the out-of-focus shapes behaved like the reference plates rather than like perfect circles.
THE LOOKDEV STUDIO
I also built a 3D studio inside the scene file — a checker cyclorama, a color chart, a gray sphere and a chrome sphere under a fixed, neutral light rig. Every asset goes through it before it is allowed into the set: albedo values checked against the chart, reflections checked on the spheres, scale checked against the checker. It means a material that reads right in the studio still reads right two hundred hours later under a wall of red filament light, and nothing has to be re-authored once the grade goes on.
Selected Works
LINKEDIN · INSTAGRAM · BEHANCE · ARTSTATION
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