Director: Robert Samuels
Client: The Discovery Channel
CG animation by Dan Sollis
A 30 second promo for a one-off special about the missing Malaysian Airlines plane – MH370. It’s entirely CG, created and rendered in Lightwave3D.
I guess what’s most special about this project was the time spent on it – or lack thereof! It was, quite frankly, an insane turnaround (a necessity given the topical nature of the programme). This went from conception to final delivery in just 4 days (with a slightly rougher earlier version aired after just 2 days!), which must be some kind of record. No, I didn’t get much sleep!
As always, Lightwave helped keep the process pretty damn fast and easy-ish. We used external render farms to render the final thing so we could hit the deadline. And to be make sure, we used two different farms: ResPower and GarageFarm.net – who were both great and very helpful. I did some final sweetening of the finished thing in After Effects, using the Lightwave-AE Interchange to send the camera and light across so we could add optical flares to some of the shots.
There’s an alternative (and quite different) version of the promo viewable here too (and I love both!).
