Aau’s Song

Nestled in Cape Town and Galway is South African studio Triggerfish, which unleashes the power of the kyber crystals in Aau’s Song

“Daniel Clarke [writer, director] had fun painting snapshots of Korban life, and envisioning the landscapes,” states Nadia Darries, the writer and director alongside Clarke. “We then jumped into layout, building a rudimentary poly version of all the sets in a single Maya scene to get a good sense of the scale of the world. It took a lot of fiddling to get the scale relationships right. The rock spires and cave were actually built in a sort of Legoblock manner. We used 3D scans of real rocks and artists assembled the world rock by rock. Our lead modeller, Armand, eventually knew every rock by heart! The cave was particularly challenging because it had to make sense as a dome structure that was formed by volatile events long ago.”

Originally there was to be no 2D animation. Clarke says: “Due to time and budgetary restriction, Nadia and I found that it was often much faster and cheaper for us two to create 2D elements, Nadia in After Effects and me in Photoshop using Animdessin, and hand them over to comp rather than trying to create compelling visual effects in a 3D package. For example, all the wind and debris effects as well as the crystal’s wide shots [and the close-up transformation shot] were plates and mattes that Nadia and I created, sometimes building the whole shot between the two of us.”

The kyber crystals found in the Force Space were visually challenging elements. “It had to walk a delicate line between scary, mysterious and beautiful, as well as the abstract and literal,” notes Clarke. “We ended up hiring motion graphics artists who worked in After Effects, as the look we were aiming at was stylised and somewhat graphic, which would have taken much longer to achieve in the more straightforward 3D pipeline. Nadia and I also worked on a lot of the crystal singing shots using Photoshop and After Effects.”