‘NeoMorphus’ is the second short art film created by Animatorio of Brazil for the Praepostere film series. It is art directed by Gabriel Nobrega. It is a highly detailed phantasm piece with moody lighting and subtle organic animation.

Gabriel tells us about the process:

“We spent two years in between the first sketch and the final render. In this period we saw the evolution of Dragon and tested all versions. In truth before the 1.0 version, we already implemented a system at Animatorio. In the beginning we developed our own in-house stop-motion capture software. But Dragon had better speed of play, multiple exposures and other features that made us drop our system and adopt Dragon.  

“One thing was essential for us, the possibility of integration with scripts. After a few exchanges with Dragon Stop Motion, we received an exclusive version of Dragon with a scripting feature. Later this feature was refined and became official in the 2.0 versions. It was so important for us, because it was the only way to control and refine many of the techniques we developed here. Our motion control is a little unconventional. For all of our camera movements, we used a Fanuc Robot commonly used in car factories.  It’s perfectly precise and brings us a world of possibilities. We made the camera animation in Maya; sometimes using low poly models of the background for the visualization.

“In Maya we also animated the zoom and focus of the camera, nowadays it’s possible to control the focus with Dragon, but in the beginning it wasn’t, so we constructed a little machine with Servos and Arduino to do it.

“After we exported this animation for the robot and Dragon, a stand alone application synchronized both. The integration of scripts was very important for us.  

“We tested a lot programs that didn’t have a very simple thing; the possibility to flip with the current frame. Some software has it, but with a little delay. For the animators it’s absolutely essential and must to be in real time. We did a lot of takes backwards and the reverse play was very useful to us as well. Unfortunately when we thought to capture this film stereoscopically, it was too late. We are anxious to create a new film and explore this new universe.

“We used: a Canon 5D Mark II to capture, Nuke to composite, and a lot of rubber, wire, foam, glue and of course for everything else- old things from grandma’s house.”

Sound by YB Music

Here is the making of video with great preliminary character sketches and set shots: