Cecile B. Evans
“Reality or not”
DESCRIPTION
We had the opportunity to collaborate with artist Cecile B. Evans on a series of special effects for their 2023 film "Reality Or Not," which premiered at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, and has since been featured at the Singapore Art Museum, SODA Manchester, and Lafayette Anticipations.
Our team worked closely with Cecile to breathe life into key scenes through a variety of custom animation workflows.
TOOLS
→ Unreal Engine
→ Blender
→ Davinci Resolve
→ EB Synth
Workflows
→ Virtual set design
→ Custom rigging and 3D animation
→ AI assisted character animation
→ Seamless VFX integration
→ Procedural swarm generation
ML
ML, a central character in the film, was created using a custom designed AI workflow. Using actress Hayett McCarthy's live action performances as our source material, INCworks was able to plug the footage into Stable Diffusion's ControlNet. We then utilized EBsynth to interpolate between AI-rendered poses and hand drawn character illustrations, eventually mapping the illustrated character onto the original footage.
This process automatically animated ML to replicate Hayett's performances, while maintaining frame to frame consistency with the hand drawn character design.
After we completed ML's character animation, we developed a unique 'paper doll' system for placing ML into an Unreal Engine environment where her scenes could be shot and rendered.
ANTI-VERITY FACTORY
In 'Reality or Not', the Antiverity Factory is fictionalized version of Cern's Elena particle collider, set in a post-apolcalytpic future in which the walls of the facility have crumbled, overgrown vegetation has crept in, and the world has flooded. The set was modeled and textured in Maya and Substance Painter using a combintation of custom made and found assets, and staged in Unreal Engine 5.
The scene also features swarms of computer-generated butterflies that form a tornado and fly through the real-life CERN facility in the shots below.
Collective Of Renders
The Collective of Renders is a fictional K-Pop group. In the film they are featured posing and dancing in a multitude of spaces, including an Egg packing facility, an abandoned school, and an abandoned theme park. The characters were made in Metahuman and were composited using a combination of Unreal Engine 5 and Davinci Fusion.
