The Can! The Pen! The Cooler!
No self-respecting citizen of Fat City wants to find themselves there, but that’s exactly what happens to Two-Headed Cop.
The jail sequence is the first to go into production, and I’m very excited to be able to show off some views of the jail set that was recently completed by the talented environmental modeler Lyra Ulangca. (You can see more of Lyra’s work here.) The views in the above movie are actual shots from the film, minus the characters (and lighting.)
As is the plan with most of our environment design, we wanted to take the idea of the location to an extreme. Instead of being simply a precinct lock-up, it’s got some medieval dungeon in its DNA.
We wanted it to be somewhere between the “imaginary prisons” of Giovanni Piranesi, like the one below:
… and the scene shown here, from noir classic “The Asphalt Jungle”:
(By the way, that guy in the shot above is James Whitmore, who forty-four years later played Brooks Hatlen in The Shawshank Redemption. Also, he sold Miracle-Gro.)
I found the need for reference imagery far greater for the environment than for the character, simply due to the volume of detail and need for specificity. I sent our modeler images of the elevator from the famous Bradbury Building in downtown LA, the Deco details of the Ghostbusters building in NY, and a slew of other pics to get across what I wanted to see in in every corner of the set.
There’s a fascinating book called “Underworld: Sites of Concealment” that also provided some inspiration. It documents all manner of underground structures, from the ancient, like the stone arches in the collage above, to the modern, like the strangely beautiful sewage treatment plant below:
Happy Friday!
And he’s in the slammer! Wait’ll you see how he gets out!
If you’ve just tuned in, “Two-Headed Cop” has recently gone into production, and the above clip is one of our first shots to (almost) be completed in animation. I say “almost” because it’s still a bit of a work in progress, as there are little things here and there that need polish. But I was so thrilled to finally see these guys in action I couldn’t wait to post it! They’re alive! ALIVE!
I’ll post another version of the shot once it has the cloth simulation working and it’s been lit, so you can see how it evolves to the final look.
It’s gonna look super badass and film noir-y!
Kind of. It’s definitely still a work in progress as you can see in the above still. There’s actually no cloth sim in that image, and the character’s irises and pupils have gone missing, and the environment actually has no lighting at all on it, but I’m still pretty pleased with how it’s coming along. I’m hoping to have an actual movie with the lighting in it soon, so stay tuned.
Back to work!