PROJECT INSIGHT
When lightning strikes
Trevor Hogg gets engulfed by a fire caused by a lightning strike in Automaton
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A long with creating feature films, Pixar also produces shorts with Automaton representing a departure in terms of story and production. Premiering at SIGGRAPH 2020 Computer Animation Festival, the four-minute long project, produced by artists from Pixar’s Effects team, can be found on the studio’s official YouTube channel and depicts before, during, and the aftermath of a brushfire through effects simulations created entirely within Houdini for grass, wind, clouds, lightning, fire, smoke and rain.
“It started in 2018 when we had a little downtime and we could use all of the other artists to produce the work,” explains Krzysztof Rost, technical director at Pixar, who conceived and directed Automaton.
“Then we continued with compositing and lighting, but that was a much smaller group; that continued for some time. We finally started to cement everything in place with the editorial and sound in 2019.” The concept was born out of the events occurring in 2018. “We had these series of fires happening all around California. I never witnessed one up close but what I experienced driving across the Bay Bridge were the results of them, the pollution, smoke and lighting. On one hand you had a beautiful eerie lighting condition going through this orange colour, and at the same time I was thinking about climate change and how it is affecting us on a daily basis. I remember one morning coming to work where my car was covered in ash.”
No human beings or animals are shown as the true characters are the natural elements such as the wind. “There’s no conversation or dialogue,” states Rost. “I started to ask more existential questions. From the Big Bang to now, this is the reality around us. What do we do going forward? I loved this concept of playing with time back and forth. It started with the colour and goes back to this basic concept of black and white, the simple components of everything around us. The particulate, the atomic level, the notion of everything we’re made of. I am more interested in the mechanism. That’s why [I chose the title of] ‘Automaton’.”