Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 7, 2016. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
“Bear” is a personal story by Pascal Floerks about his grandfather’s past in the Second World War. The short film, in which a full-CG bear was integrated into real photographs, was the student’s graduation project at the Animationsinstitut at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg. It was completed in 2014 and has since been shown at more than 150 festivals worldwide. Among other things, “Bear” won the First Steps Award in 2014; you can find the complete list of awards here.
DP: How did you come up with the idea for the film?
Pascal Floerks: During the period when I was looking for ideas for my diploma, I read the comic
“Blacksad” by Juanjo Guarnido and Juan Díaz Canales. In it, all
characters are depicted as animals. I was taken with the depiction of the characters
as animals because it made the figures immediately understandable, even though I did
not yet know them. I definitely wanted to do something different from the usual rigging jobs
that I had done at the Animationsinstitut for other projects. My grandfather
was very close to me, and his character and his fate always moved me. So I asked myself: what animal would my grandfather be? Definitely a bear. That is how this idea came about.
DP: How big was your team?
Pascal Floerks: I primarily made the film by myself. Simply because
the amount of work was manageable and I trusted myself to handle the project alone.
On the musical side, I was supported by Christian Heck (www.sumophonic.de). Producer Julia Smola took care of organisational matters.
DP: What references did you use for the bear?
Pascal Floerks: The book “Animal Anatomy for Artists” by Eliot Goldfinger has a few
pages about bear anatomy, which was helpful as a basis. I was also able to find a few photos of bears on the internet that had lost their fur because of an illness.
At some point, I then limited myself to a few good references.
DP: Which tools did you use to create the CG bear?
Pascal Floerks: I first sculpted the bear in ZBrush and then did a retopology
in 3DCoat. I painted textures for fur and body in Mari. For the
fur grooming, I used “Yeti Fur” for Maya. The whole thing was then rendered with Arnold. Alongside Arnold’s own hair shader “aiHair,” I also liked using Anders Langlands’ shader, “alHair.” I did the final compositing in Nuke .
DP: How did you go about creating a realistic-looking bear?
Pascal Floerks: That really was not easy; I needed several attempts. Since
I had never worked with fur in 3D before, there was a lot to learn here. Especially
because at the beginning it was difficult for me to judge the correct volume of the fur, the reference photos were a great help. At first, I made the geometry’s volume too large and had to shorten the hair. As it turned out over time, however, the fur looked more realistic and better when it was longer. I therefore reduced the volume of the bear again.
Furthermore, the right lighting setup and a good hair shader were decisive for realistic-looking fur. Arnold comes with a good hair shader and renders a large number of hairs without problems. That and a little compositing ultimately resulted in the bear looking realistic. I had to vary the number and width of the rendered hairs a great deal, depending on how large the bear appeared and how sharp or blurred it needed to be for the image. For the fur, I liked using area lights for soft shadows and additional directional lights for sharp highlights. By rendering AOVs, I was able to effectively adjust all the parameters once again in compositing.
DP: How did you approach editing the old pictures?
Pascal Foerks: Very conventionally. At first, I left the photos in the style
they were in. I tried to light the bear in 3D as well as possible so that
it was already integrated in the rendering. I then did the finer details in compositing.
DP: What means did you use to achieve the optimal integration of the bear into the photographic environment?
Pascal Floerks: Since for almost all the photos—apart from three that I
made for the end of the film—I had no HDR or other reference material available,
I placed and adjusted lights in Maya until it felt right.
Sometimes that took a long time, but sometimes it went very quickly. The bear was considerably easier
to integrate into the black-and-white war photographs than into the colour photographs. In my experience, 3D fur is more forgiving when the light does not match one hundred percent, but it also quickly tends to look flat. For
some photos, I therefore achieved the optimal integration only when I placed the
light differently from what would actually have been “correct” for the photo. I often placed area lights behind the bear to achieve a beautiful rim-light effect.
I was able to achieve another boost through my unusual workflow by having the photos edited on the computer exposed as slides: developed as slides,
I projected the photos onto a screen with a slide projector and filmed them
again. Exposing them as slides had the effect that the bear and the photo
blended even better.
DP: Did you create a new bear for every photo, or is it one model that
you adapted for every photo?
Pascal Floerks: At the beginning, I created a master bear into which I built a simple
rig with the intention of using it to roughly put him into the appropriate pose. For the war photos, which take place earlier in time, I created a junior bear from the
master bear. Starting from these two bears,
I put the model into the appropriate pose and made corrections with ZBrush.
DP: How easy or difficult was it to obtain the photographic material from the German Federal Archives ?
Pascal Floerks: Obtaining the photographic material was actually easier than expected.
The Federal Archives has an online library where you can search directly for material. High-resolution files are available for all images. You get them when you pay for the respective use/exploitation variant. In my case, that were around 73 euros per image.
