The Story
With an environment as unforgiving as the precolonial Canadian arctic, Frostbite shines a light on two strong sisters. Una, a young girl who wants to prove to her older sister, Noma, that she’s more capable than she looks, adventures in the woods by herself and gets into more than she can bargain for.
The Team
Nicholas Christie, Stephanie MacCarthy, Brian Luong
Director
Lead Animator, Previsualization, Layout, Editor, Rigging
Environment TD & FX TD
Environment Look Development, props, textures, Houdini FX, lighting, compositing
Character TD
Character FX, Character Look Development, Environment Look Development, Textures, Lighting, Compositing
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Why Frostbite?
In this film we explore personal growth and relationships issues that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries. Una, a young girl who has had to grow up in the shadow of her older sister, always felt that she was inadequate. Una finds that she had the need to prove herself to her sister, her parents, and most of all to herself that she is more capable than she looks. Frostbite is not just a story about perseverance but about growing up. We want this film to show that these struggles are not unique to Una but are universal. When things are stressful it's okay to ask for help and to admit that you are not ready.
Houdini FX
by Stephanie MacCarthy
At first when we came up with our thesis we had no idea we were going to do this much simulation! I never touched Houdini before my senior year and it was definitely overwhelming at first.
Come October, we were committed to make our thesis look realistic but stylized at the same time and that would mean having realistic simulation for cloth, fur, and snow. It was a lot of trial and error and overall we learned so much.
The snow interaction and snowfall were all done using Houdini Vellum Grains Solver and Geometry Solver. It took a lot of different iterations to get the consistency correct and overall just a lot of repetition cleaning up minor issues that would come up.
I used several constraint layers. First I wanted to control the clumpiness of areas of snow. I did this by using an attribute VOP and create an aanoise attribute to control the voronoi of the color breakups. I then calculated a threshold with VEX to delete certain areas of the snow based on my threshold. After that I used another attribute VOP to make those frozen areas and more fluffy areas. I used the color of the various noises I created to control the attraction weight of the neighboring points. With this information I could use a distance along edges vellum constraint and use that for my vellum grains simulation in DOPs.
To optimize the simulation, I created an active attribute that would keep the nearby particles “asleep”. Then, before I cache it I remove the points that are not active to have a more seamless interaction with the ground. For creating the volumes, I first created a density attribute with VEX and then using VEX again I created a density multiplier to create a more natural falloff of the snow to make it emulate the sun scattering along the top of the snow.
Concept Art
By Emily Mai
Color Language
By Brian Luong
Color Scripts
By Stephanie MacCarthy & Brian Luong
Environments
By Stephanie MacCarthy
Here are a few renders of the forest environment. I was very comfortable with substance painter but realized I needed to create the bark textures from a more procedural approach. I used substance designer to design the bark and vegetation and the snow material Brian made procedurally in Arnold. It was really difficult to achieve the glint at first but after several iterations we achieved a look to match our film. In addition, the plants and additional vegetation were all done using procedural shading and triplanes projection in Arnold.
From the beginning I was excited to get to work on such a vast environment and work on the story behind that environment. I really wanted to explore how I could make a CG forest without it looking too CG. We wanted stylized but realistic textures for sure. Taking on such a massive environment was definitely challenging. Brian and I looked at so many references for snow and the glint of the snow in the sunlight. We explored different types of shadow color because of the sunset.
This environment had a lot of trial and error. I started learning procedural modeling for the pine and aspen trees to have them look unique. I needed to go shot by shot to see what worked and what didn’t with vegetation and made sure to be deliberate with the directionality of several props.
Characters
by brian luong
Brian was able to create our characters based on several references including those drawn by Emily Mai. The characters Una and Noma are influenced by a plethora of arctic cultures but we do not define this story to any particular culture or tribe. It is simply an avenue to illustrate the bond of two sisters after a terrifying encounter with our third character, the polar bear. Brian and I worked together to do draw overs in order to improve the design and shape language.
Nick and Brian worked together to do draw overs in order to improve the design and shape language.
Animation
By nicholas christie
actresses erin engleman and audrey loverro
Animation spline by Nicholas Christie
Nicholas did such an amazing job finding such talented classmates to help us out on animation. Nicholas is very good at directing a team of animators and when it was time to get passes in by. He would give them notes on their animation passes to keep the animation consistent with the overall film.
We recorded reference with two awesome actresses Erin Engleman and Audrey Loverro and Nicholas recorded any additional reference he needed for animation to get the most believable look we could!