Another non-commercial project, but a rendezvous video… Let me explain myself.
The thing is… I used to love having lunch with some company mates at this barely legal chinese restaurant near our office, Palacio de China. Unbeatable prices, fairly reasonable synthetic food, dragons and eastern parafernalia all over the place. Popular as it was at the beginning, it would lose followers overtime. Not me. Never. However, convincing my mates to join me at lunch was getting harder and harder every time. Bastards. So had to really push myself to the edge to come up with something they couldn’t say no to.
At the beginning, it was suposed to be something simpler. But, once again, Internet made me do it. So when Bruce Lee’s “Game of Death” sequence came along, clouds vanished and everything was a sunny day in my head.
The idea was very clear. One-on-one nunchakus fight and one concept: “No Knives, No Forks. Only Sticks. Palacio de China”. Yeah, brilliant.
Tight sync editing along some direct soundtrack would be the core of it all, but wouldn’t hurt some VFX, right?
To visually make east cuisine triumph over west fast food, I decided Bruce Lee would be attacked with burgers and fries tossed at him from behind the camera, as if the cameraman himself was attacking dear Bruce. He would smash them all apart with his nunks. Final attack would be a flock of won-tons, which he doesn’t destroy, but rather stop dead in the air with a gesture… and accept. Kind of a counter-tribute to Matrix´s Neo-stops-bullets scene (Matrix´s dojo scene was clearly inspired on “Game of Death”).
Yeah, freak power. But a great piece to learn a couple of new things: digital sculpting and subdivision Arnold rendering. Hey, food had to look real. Burgers had to look bumpy, sesame seeds on bread couldn’t be flat, and won-ton texture had to resemble a walk on the moon. Wasn’t enough with some bump maps here and there. However, didn’t want to come up with tons of polies just to invite my friends to Palacio de China… They’re just not worth it.
So… did some basic modelling over Maya Arnold subdivision feature and sent the models to Mudbox… for the very first time in my life. Started sculpting, tested things, going back and forth from/to Maya… till I came up with a nice vector displacement map for each element.
This feature works great: gives you all the power of Maya+Arnold and detail unthinkable if modelled the traditional way.
Animated, shaded and lighted all elements with Maya. Finished compositing in Nuke.
Great day at Palacio de China. Everybody came along… for the last time. Owners had closed the restaurant three months earlier to make some changes… Horrible changes. Lots of orange and plastic. Fewer dragons… What a fraud… Won-tons would never taste the same.