TNT Drama Series ‘Legends’ Teaser

Loica, a production studio based in Santiago, Chile have used a novel combination of photography, 3D scanning and Blender to produce a stunning promo for TNT’s recent drama series ‘Legends’ starring British actor Sean Bean.

Working with their office in Santa Monica, Hollywood they have collaborated with the Turner Creative team for a month in which they took still photography and 3D scans to the next level developing post production techniques to create a sequence that showcases a hyper real cinematic feel, fitting with the high production values of the show and expressing its psychological mystery.

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First steps

Starting with detailed photographs and 3D scans of the cast and props, they refined the models with sculpting tools, later adding layers such as hair, shaders and lighting to emphasize the realism and life of the scenes. They built Sean Bean as a low poly mesh object and using a multires modifier, they sculpted fine detail. The model was rigged to enable the team to easily pose and adapt the character into multiple positions to match the basis photographs, which combined with the scans gave them the ability to fully control the look and feel of each shot.

Shading

Shading was added in the form of several passes including diffuse layers enhanced with cloning and stencil work while reflection layers were used to add life to the eyes and a feeling of texture to the various materials of character’s clothes and props. Movement of light sources in the scenes was used to bring motion to the otherwise completely still characters giving a sense of time frozen in a moment.

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Details

Blender’s hair system was used in order to produce simulations of Sean’s beard hair and the team even went as far as adding smaller details such as skin hair on the nose and eyelashes. In motion, these touches bring a sense of true depth and realism to the shots.

‘Memory Loss’

The team has made good use of the Cycles renderer by using a modified glass shader to produce a heavy depth of field effect that they have named ‘Memory Loss’. They explored this route after finding that simple post effect depth of field effects weren’t producing enough of what they envisioned. Passing a 3D plane with this shader through the character allowed them to finely control the spatial and focal elements of the shot.

Overall

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The studio has reported that the team had a great experience with Blender especially in terms of the single program workflow. To be able to model, texture, sculpt, preview and render in the same package helped streamline the workflow which accelerated production.

Studio

Loica’s show reel exhibits a broad range of styles without watering down the quality and beauty of the work they do. From the artsy UNICEF promo and cheeky use of visual effectsfor Volkswagen to the refined quality of ABC’s ‘Once Upon a Time’ promo they have proved themselves adept in multiple fields of graphic production. The promo can be viewed here and their website is http://loica.tv/