The Planet - The Beast

A blog dealing with giant movie monsters got in contact with us recently. They wanted to feature a big spanky image of the main 'god' monster from the film. Mark Stirton, director bloke, asked me to fluff up an image of the beast for inclusion in the site - so I did.

I won't post it here as it's a bit spoilery, but if you really want to look it's on this site Undead Backbrain. The beast is rendered from the original model Mark animated in the movie, this version was rendered in Vue 6, as was the background. The wee chaps are purely for scale - or comedy effect.

The Planet - The Planet

I've put quite a few bits of design work for the movie up recently, so I thought is was about time to feature the star of the film - the planet, himself (I'm sure it's a bloke).

The design work for the planet came very early on, literally as soon as Mark had the title I started hammering out various planets - some were comically wrong. All of the designs were created in photoshop then mapped on spheres in Cinema 4D (planet, clouds, atmosphere). The final photoshop files were created mainly from satellite photos of south western Australia, taken from this site here. Final file size came to about 280meg for the 4 maps making up the planet (image, diffusion, speculative, bump), with a further 70meg for the 3 cloud maps.

The detail was necessary as it meant the planet could be viewed from all angles and could stand up in close up work. As the movie was done at PAL resolution (720x576 pixels) there was a bit of lee way with the shots, but the detail was there if we needed poster work and publicity shots.

For anyone that has seen the film you'll know how far off the mark the original design was: even though the survivors may be thousands of miles from the sea, the audience will wonder why they're moaning about no water. Best to make it a sandy hell-hole.