Idea -
It was conceived from Franco Tassi, chief of TaxFree Film (www.taxfreefilm.it), for the science-fiction series UFO, a tribute to the fantastic “Interceptor”.
Like for every work, we have started looking for all the possible material and try hands on all DVDs, the books of the “making of” and most of all, an expert of the series as big as Franco Tassi, it was really easy.
We have tried at the beginning to use just references of the original model and not to use all those images of models created by many fans which didn’t have the details we were searching for.
The idea for the setting was to bring into light the past 40 years starting from the beginning of the series, placing the neglected interceptor on the moon, trying to imagine how time would have changed the scene.
For this reason we collected a lot of moon’s scenes in a setting with a light full of contrasts creating thus artifacts as lens flares and similar stuff for the camera framing the scene.
Image of the main reference for the moon’s style |
Modeling -
I started with the model applying a simple cube, “cutting and sewing up” patiently until I reached a proof I was happy with.
At this point I didn’t meet big difficulties even though the mechanical modeling has never been my main interest, as I usually favor the characters.
The main difference was in the respect of certain bending which should be reproduced in the best way not to create some unwanted specular effects and most of all, to escape the rage of my boss! :-)
As soon as we finished our model we realized that we could improve the details much better than the original model. Sure enough they couldn’t have been rendered very precisely because of the little dimensions.
At that moment we have taken all the real references of shuttle, motors, and so on, to decide what we could add without perverting the original idea of the tribute. We didn’t want it to be a stylistic evolution of the spacecraft, but a more illustrative graphic computer’s adaptation.
Texturing -
The modeling was followed by the most complicated step, i.e. to unwrap every piece of the interceptor to be able to differentiate every single texture and to manage every zone at our pleasure.
There were many pieces and to create the textures I have started from a collage of many pictures of the shuttle and from many sci-fi series. Nevertheless in the end I had to draw 80 % of it by hand to adapt them to the various modeled parts.
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