Director Magnus Renfors from Hobbyfilm came to us and asked for help with a project for Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat. It’s an Epic story in black and white – in the line of films like “Brazil” or “La cité des enfants perdus” – a story about what the world would have looked like in the 30′s if the web and newspaper had co-existed. Not the Internet as we know it today but a web constructed out of huge mechanical devices, wires, cogs and man-powered machines.
Even though some of the effects could be achieved in camera and with built studio sets a lot of what Magnus wanted called for extra “digital” aid from Stopp’s Vfx Department. The schedule was really tight and we only had 3 days to put things together after the offline edit was completed. But as Magnus said “you have to love all films where you can throw in a Zeppelin without it seeming like an odd idea”. We love that too, so we decided to jump in and help realize Magnus’ ideas.
To get everything delivered on time it was crucial for Stopp to be tightly involved in production. We were there to support all the way from pre production and planning to on-set supervision and online.
Stopp’s Vfx Department provided previzes to help planning for the shoot and early test edits. On-set Stopp provided vfx-supervision and also a DIT to take care of and check all files as the entire production was shot digitally on RED One. For example we could check files and make sure that green screen footage would hold for keying.
At the same time back at the base our Vfx Department was busy preparing a bunch of matte paintings and testing dynamics/building a rig for jerking wires that could easily be added and adapted where needed. Also a lot of design work was done modelling generic props that could be added later in the process. Finally everything was put together on our Flames under a couple of hectic days and happily we can say that the spot came out nicely and on time.

Stopp constructed a number of different machines, since there was so many of each kind, most of them had systems set up with easy configurable properties, such as “Steam power” which enabled the CG team to create a new behaviour for each instance of the machine without re-animating any properties manually, resulting in realistic random looking behaviour. Here’s an example: