To launch the BBC’s coverage of the Olympic Winter Games, BBC Creative and Blinkink partnered to create “Extreme by Nature,” a mixed media animation that brings to life the intensity of the competition through the harsh worlds of ice and snow.
Directed by Balázs Simon via Blinkink, the gritty piece combines in-camera effects and post with intricate stop-motion animation, with entire scenes 3D printed frame-by-frame.
The unique nature of this approach and its dramatic impact propelled “Extreme by Nature” to the #1 slot in SHOOT’s first quarterly Top Ten VFX/Animation Chart of the year.
Simon shared, “I really admire people having the will to push things to the limits. What could be a better example for that than the Olympics? Especially the Winter Games where they compete in environments that are so different from our usual experiences.” Simon in turn felt he had to live up to that dedication, a good way being “to bring the film out to the real world. Although most of my work is tied to digital animation, I’m most intrigued by the physical reality and the uncertainties that come with it. In a way I wanted to find myself in a similar situation as the Olympians: in a foreign, unforgiving place which needs to be conquered.”
Towards that end, the athletes were depicted, said the director, as “being born into ice and snow, and eventually breaking out (of cubes and environmental hardship).”
Getting close
Simon noted that his “most favorite task” centered on coming up with a solution for the camerawork in the snow scenes. He said, “To get a first hand experience of the characters’ efforts, I wanted to bring the viewer as close to them as possible: a great example of how a seemingly simple creative decision could grow into a big web of intertwined technical challenges. Going close called for fast moving cameras to keep up with the Olympians. We wanted to have a dynamic feel for the shots themselves as well, not just the content in the cubes, so we also had to move the real world cameras. We started to think about cameras differently: some of their motion would be directly ‘printed,’ and some would be actual movement of the control rig. We designed an artist-friendly way to split the camera into two components: animation to be printed and animation to be programmed on the moco rig in a way that their composite movement would result in the intended motion set up in the previz.”
Next up was creating the box cutouts that Simon envisioned for the characters. But to his horror, the scenes made no sense visually. He explained, “We essentially lost all of the environment around the characters; it just didn’t fit in the small space. Without a point of reference the Olympians lost their sense of speed, and what’s worse, the supposedly harsh environment they competed in became nonexistent. So we had to find a way to squeeze everything into the cubes. That’s how the forced perspective idea came in, which we had to solve completely algorithmically: we had deep spaces with characters moving close and far away, followed by fast, rotating cameras. There was no way of figuring out how to distort everything by hand. When seen from the camera, the scenes make sense, but from any other angle they’re pretty abstract and distorted!”
Ultimately it was all reconciled. Simon observed, “So much back and forth between departments, which wouldn’t have been possible without such a devoted team and expert coordination. From finding the right mixture for the 3D prints, designing rigs that moved objects, lights, and cameras to all the post work to make it look seamless–everybody brought their A-game to the table. I’m sure all of us have a great sense of accomplishment knowing that in our way we also conquered the elements, like the heroes in the film.”
Click here to view the full VFX/Animation Top Ten Chart for the first quarter of 2022.
