Making of "Soccer Universe Cup"

While working on this project I wen through entire process of pre-production, production, and post-production. Bellow is an official "making of" video, and then I will guide you through entire process of production.

The pitch:

Year 2510. People forgot about starvation, wars and terrorism. The nature has relieved. Breakthrough in medicine escaped humanity from illness and allowed using all hidden resources of humans body. It is already well known that we are not alone in the universe. And people and extraterrestrials play intergalactic politics. Somewhere in the space there is an "Intergalactic Olympic stadium" where Soccer Universe Cup is held. In the final there are two teams "Team Human" and "Team Jupiter" meat each other in the battle for Universe Cup.

Visual script:

One of the early versions of the visual script.

Visual script | page 1	Visual script | page 2	Visual script | page 3

Visual script | page 4	Visual script | page 5	Visual script | page 6
Visual script | page 7

Animatic:

Making of the Stadium:

Intergalactic Olympic Stadium is huge space station and at the same time it is a stadium. So for references we used a lot images of the modern stadiums and space stations from different sci-fi movies. To make space station look like a stadium from outside we decided to add a huge glass dome on top of it. So that we can see the stadium and how the light from stadium spreads out to the space.

Some references for design:

References of a space station	References of a space station	References of a space station

References of a Stadium	References of a Stadium	References of a Stadium

Sketches of a stadium:

Stadium Sketch ideas	Stadium Sketch ideas	Final Sketch

Final Sketch	Final Sketch	Final Sketch

Making of "Intergalactic Olympic stadium": 

Making of the E.T. soccer player:

For ET soccer player we decided to make a creature, which looks like a mix of human and panther with very strong and big body elements that are used to play soccer. E.T. soccer player should like he was born to play soccer. 

Since modeling is no my focus I decided to make modeling process much easier. As a starting point I took a dummy model of a human and separated body, arms, and head. Then I used several deformers and sculpting tool to get a basic shape of the ET. Separately I modeled a head and merged all elements together. And as a final touch I imported my model to ZBrush and sculpted additional muscle details.

References and Sketches for E.T. player:

Reference for E.T. player	Reference for E.T. player	Sketche of E.T. player

Reference for E.T. player	Reference for E.T. player	Reference for E.T. player
Sketch of E.T. player	Sketch of E.T. player	Sketch of E.T. player

Our character is a mix of panther, human and reptile. I decided to make his skin look like reptile skin. And also his skin needs to have several text elements for name and number. After looking through thousands of reference images of snakes I decided to go with snake texture. And as a main reference I took images of “Central American Coral Snake”.

I decided to create separate texture for head and the rest of the body. It will allow me to have more resolution on a head, because there are several shots that require close up for head. For texturing I created a PSD network for body and head and drew 2K textures for color map, bump map and specular map.

To give our character more futuristic look, I decided to add several glowing lines and highlight skin cells. I found a very great reference of CG snake that has similar effect. The best way to achieve desired effect is to make it in post production. So, I decided to make separate black and white mates, render it as a separate pass, and then composite everything in post production.

Making of "E.T. soccer player":

Animation of E.T. soccer player:

Our character is going to be animated using motion capture it doesn’t need to have a very complex rig. Basically it needs only a skeleton with proper drawn weights to get correct mesh deformations, but motion capture of hands and face is a very difficult process. And since my project doesn’t require a lot of face and hand motions, it is easy for me to set up a rig for facial and hand animation. For hand animation I used driven keys for switching between several gestures. For face I created a rig to control mouth, tongue and eyes. For emotions I used blend shapes.

Making of "Animation of E.T. player":

Making of Crowd:

Stadium crowd were made using Maya particle systems. I took several CG people, animated them using motion capture, lit them and rendered facing towards the camera. Then using several expressions I randomly assigned my crowd to particles, and offset animation.

Making of "stadium crowd":

Video shooting:

There are two main locations in my movie. Actions take place on a "Intergalactic Olympic Stadium" in a far galaxy and also actions take place on the "Earth".

In June I was vacationing in my home city Kaliningrad in Russia. And I decided not to waste time and shoot scene "on the Earth" there. Luckily we have a lot of training soccer fields there. So I asked my folks Vladimir Shipilov and Alexey Peshehonov to help me with shooting. It was a nice sunny evening, ideal for shooting "rain" scene :). We used some watter to make my head and uniform wet.

Pictures from location:

Discussion of the shot	Changing lenses	Shooting Point Of View shot

Shooting shot	Serious DP	Tweaking settings
Happy crew	Soccer game	Soccer game

In terms of green-screen shooting I decided to prepare as neat as possible. I’ve heard many times saying “We will fix it in “post”. But, since I am the person who has to do the post production of everything we are going to shoot, I decided to stick to another saying: “It is better prep it in “pre” rather than fix it in “post”. With the help of DP Ning Li we shot 15 shots within 13 hours.

Pictures from location:

Unpacking equipment	Framing the shot	Make up

Grey scale color chart	Lights, Camera, Action	Placing tracking markers
Tracking markers	Dolly shot	Shot list after shooting

Shots breakdown: