Chrysalis

For those who don’t know the movie: Chrysalis is a surreal short film by Robin Lochmann blending live action with CG, built in Cinema 4D, rendered in Octane Render, and finished in After Effects, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve.

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Who, what, and why this fog would not quit

DP: For the people in the back row exporting the wrong folder, who are you and what do you make?

Robin Lochmann: I am a Berlin-based filmmaker and 3D artist from Ireland. My work ranges from commercials to concert visuals, trailers and art projects and anything in between. My latest short film Chrysalis blends live action footage with digitally created characters and environments. You can find me at robinlochmann.com and linktr.ee/robin_lochmann.

DP: How did Chrysalis start, script first or vibes first?

Robin Lochmann: The film grew out of a series of visual experiments where I started to create characters and see what they looked like when integrated into real landscape footage that I shot. This is obviously the opposite of starting with a script and then creating the visuals. I was very motivated by combining the different techniques that I had learned and the resources that I had to create something on my own and push myself to make it look as seamless as possible.

DP: Where did you grab the real world plates, and what kicked it off on location?

Robin Lochmann: I was in the south of France with my Blackmagic Design camera and I just started shooting landscape shots. I find that being in a new place with a camera just creates options all of a sudden and is great for inspiration. The characters were the next step but the starting point was definitely the landscape. The project started in France back in 2023. I got a bunch of usable material before proper winter settled in. I came back about six months later, in the summertime, and did another round of shooting, this time with the drone. I chucked it into DaVinci Resolve for editing and colour correction, started organising everything by what might make sense together, and did a first pass at matching the colours of the two different cameras and seasons with very different lighting conditions.

Scope, time, and the luxury budget known as free time

DP: How long did you live with this project, and did you ever ghost it for a while?

Robin Lochmann: The project spanned over 3 years, but I did not work on it consistently. I still had to manage client work and regular life. At one point, there were about 10 months in a row where I did not open the project at all because I did not have any time. After taking longer breaks from it, it was always hard to pick it back up again, but I am stuck with it.

DP: Before the plot showed up, what did you actually know? Any hard rules, or just “please look slightly holy and slightly terrifying”?

Robin Lochmann: I did not have a script at this point, just a visual direction. I knew I wanted to integrate animated characters into the landscape, that they would be doing this ritual, and that there would be a procession.

DP: Where did the costume language come from?

Robin Lochmann: I started collecting images of religious and ceremonial robes and headpieces with a similar vibe. I wanted to contrast the religious feeling with leather straps and mix those opposing aesthetics.

DP: The main head shape feels oddly familiar, in a good way. What fed that silhouette?

Robin Lochmann: I love the look of the alchemist character in The Holy Mountain. That and a Catholic bishop’s hat, a miter, were the original inspiration for the main character’s head design. I wanted the shape to feel somewhat familiar but still unique, with a strong profile where the front is much longer than the back, almost like a shield.

DP: Any research rabbit holes you wish you could bill to a client?

Robin Lochmann: I looked at a bunch of other different religious practices, which was not particularly useful for the project in the end.

DP: What kept you from quietly deleting the folder and moving on?

Robin Lochmann: Honestly, I did not know it would take this long when I started. At some point, I had invested enough time into it that I thought I could not give up now. Maybe if I had really known how much was still ahead of me I would have given up. But I would always get motivated when I saw a new shot come together, and that would sustain me for a while.

DP: Money question, was there a budget, or just stubbornness?

Robin Lochmann: I did not have a budget, just my free time.

Tools, tracking, and the pipeline

DP: Give us the big picture workflow, from camera to final file, without pretending it was always tidy.

Robin Lochmann: Shoot real footage, first edit, 3D-track selected shots, build characters and environments in 3D, animate characters and simulate clothing, integrate 3D elements into tracked footage, render, and composite CGI with real footage.

DP: What apps did the heavy lifting, and which ones did you bounce between when nobody was watching?

Robin Lochmann: Cinema 4D was the main hub for everything, Octane Render handled all rendering, ZBrush sculpted the dog and bug characters, iClone handled base character animation and motion capture clean up, Rokoko provided motion capture, Marvelous Designer handled cloth simulation, and Substance 3D Painter handled texturing. I composited in After Effects, then finished editorial, colour grading and final delivery in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

DP: Motion wise, how much was keyframed suffering versus mocap suffering?

Robin Lochmann: About half of the film is animated by hand in iClone. That was probably the most time consuming part of the whole project. About halfway through I got a Rokoko smart suit. It lets you record body movement and transfer it to any 3D character. It still needs a lot of cleanup, but it provides a great base and definitely speeds up the process.

DP: Clothing question for anyone who has ever rage-quit a sim cache. How did you build the garments?

Robin Lochmann: I used Marvelous Designer. I started by drawing the pattern in 2D and found it helpful to look at actual tailor patterns for reference. Then I positioned the pieces around the character, sewed it together, and ran the simulation. In some cases I added top stitching lines and simulated again so the garment movement followed the character animation. Different fabric types like canvas or silk drape very differently and give different results.

Rigging: stilts, metal, and non standard creature logic

DP: The creatures look like they refuse to behave in a normal rig. How did you build and rig them without losing your mind?

Robin Lochmann: Both the dog and the bug characters are built from scratch through a combo of modelling in Cinema 4D and sculpting in ZBrush. The bug was actually pretty easy to rig, but maybe not really a standard way of doing it. I am no expert and do not have a sculpting background, so I was winging it and pushing and scraping until it took shape. I painted it in Substance Painter, which feels similar to Photoshop with layers and masks. I added wings, bones for the legs, head sculpt variations to blend between, and a joint chain through the center of the head to make it wiggly. I animated the wings and added slight bends to the body. A shot with the bug trapped inside the jar ended up being one of my favorites.

For the dog, I used the quadruped rig in Cinema 4D as a starting point, but it was a little tricky because the dog is on stilts. Also, some of the metal bodies needed to stay rigid, so I constrained that separately.

DP: The robot dog is doing a lot. Where did that idea come from, and why the wonderfully impractical stilts?

Robin Lochmann: The initial inspiration came from a sculpture I saw in the Louvre in Paris. I liked the idea of a robot animal wearing a mask and the odd, impractical idea of having it on stilts. I wanted it to look cobbled together from scrap metal and discarded parts, barely held together by a rusty frame. I made a rig for it in Cinema 4D so I could animate it. I wanted the movement to feel janky and strenuous, like the rustiness holds it back a little bit.

World building, forests, and staying sane

DP: How much is plate based, and how much is full CG?

Robin Lochmann: Roughly half of Chrysalis uses real background footage and the other half is fully CG.

DP: When you go full CG, what does a scene build look like?

Robin Lochmann: I built the environments in Cinema 4D and made two main forest sets. Once they were finished, I could move a virtual camera around and frame like in the real world. I would do a previs first as a basic render for timing and camera movement, then refine and add details before final rendering with Octane.

DP: Lighting-wise, how did you get the France vibe into the CG shots?

Robin Lochmann: I made 360-degree HDRI images in France as a starting point to light the scene. That was rarely enough by itself, so I added extra area lights and a fog volume, basically a big box of fog that sits on top of the scene and breaks up how light particles shine through it.

DP: Any survival tips for reopening giant environment files without screaming?

Robin Lochmann: Try to stay organised in big environment scenes, so when you open the project again, you do not completely lose your mind.

DP: When it was time to hit render, what did you spit out for comp, and what passes mattered?

Robin Lochmann: I rendered everything in Octane. I used EXRs with beauty, cryptomate, volume, and Z-depth passes for each shot. That was usually enough for compositing. Because I was rendering locally on a 2080 and a 3090, I would usually just render overnight but at the very end I had about one week of nonstop rendering.

Then, everything came together for compositing and final adjustments in After Effects. Because I had the cryptomasks, I could select every object separately for small color or brightness tweaks and add CG elements to real footage. Edges are a dead giveaway, so I used light wrap to bleed background light into the foreground edges. I also added haze and sometimes more fog, took down digital sharpness, and added a bit of film grain while obsessing over small details to balance the image.

DP: What did you deliver in the end, and how wild were the render times shot to shot?

Robin Lochmann: 4k 24fps. Render times varied a lot. Some shots, where it was just one character that would later be composited onto real footage, rendered quickly while the fullCG scenes took much longer. Because I was rendering on the go, at night, it is really hard to say how long the total render times were.

Sound: music first, then realism on top

DP: Who made it sound expensive, and how did you brief them without writing a novel?

Robin Lochmann: Music by Robot Koch and sound design and mixing by Philippe Glandien. Throughout working on the project, I would listen to Robot Koch’s music while watching playbacks and I knew that I wanted him to do the music for the film. I sent him a locked edit and gave him some guidelines, but I already trusted his taste and style.

After just two revisions teh music was locked down. For the sound design, I gave Philippe Glandien the film with the final music. I wanted to aim for realism. The sound design should just support the visuals and make the film feel more tactile, while the music was the emotional heartbeat.

Updates mid project: the good, the bad, and the crashy

DP: Over three years, updates happen. Which upgrades were helpful, and which ones tried to eat your project?

Robin Lochmann: Because the project went on so long, I did have to update most tools along the way. The worst was After Effects. The number of crashes kept increasing, and by the end I could not even close the project without it crashing. Some updates in Cinema 4D were really useful, like their particle system and the updated cloth simulations.

I used these cloth simulations to tear the cocoon and the main character’s wings directly inside Cinema 4D. To control where cloth breaks, you can paint a vertex map, allowing tearing to occur precisely. For the cocoon emergence, I layered different versions so they pushed up from underneath and broke at various points, with layers reacting to each other and different physical properties.

DP: And the white webbing lines that creep over things? How did you do that?

Robin Lochmann: I shot particles at the object and traced the particle path to form a line. The particles split and form new particles. I used the same technique in a couple of shots where white webbing covers everything.

DP: If you rebuilt the character pipeline today, what would you streamline first?

Robin Lochmann: Some of the workflows were also not the most efficient *cough* in terms of bouncing between the different tools, especially for the characters. Bringing them from motion capture to cleanup, clothing, and then back into C4D to remove the base and attach the head involved too many steps. I am not a coder, so I had to do it all manually, but I think now I would try to use AI to write a script to automate it.

DP: Any deleted scenes you still mourn, or are they safely buried in a folder called OLD_FINAL_FOR_REAL_THIS_TIME?

Robin Lochmann: I made early test shots to see how the parts combined. None of those shots ended up in the film. In earlier versions there were other characters I built and then cut out, like a giant baby statue, an awful kid, and a mask. I even finished a couple of scenes with one character, then went to the cinema to see Dune 2 and saw characters so similar that I decided to remove that character completely.

DP: You skipped the festival waiting game at first. What was the thinking, and what happened after you hit publish?

Robin Lochmann: I decided to skip festivals at first and go straight online, mainly because I did not want to wait so long to share it. I am really glad I made that decision. Even with a decent festival run, you are lucky to have a couple of thousand people see your film. Two weeks after release, we had already gotten over 100k views on YouTube just organically. That was way more than I expected, since not many people want to watch short films. The feedback has been great. I am also submitting it to some smaller festivals now that do not disqualify films that are already publicly available.

DP: Last one. When did you stop tweaking and let it leave the nest, or the render farm, whichever hurts more?

Robin Lochmann: Sometimes all you need is a deadline. Right up until it was being screened, I was still tweaking details that nobody else would ever notice. Then, when the time was up, I was happy to let it go. I think only you can decide for yourself when it is finished; nobody else can make that decision for you.

https://www.robinlochmann.com/

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