"Stumbling upon a forgotten treasure map in the form of an ancient sentient robot, two post-apocalyptic scavengers find themselves amidst a mystery of a galactic scale."
Written and illustrated by Ben Mauro, HUXLEY is the world’s first graphic novel released in the NFT format. Moreover, HUXLEY is an entire world rich in history, intrigue and R-rated action, and it is currently being developed into a feature film and TV series. This trailer only shows a glimpse of things to come.
Directed by – Sava Zivkovic
Produced by – Sava Zivkovic and Ben Mauro
Design and Art Direction – Ben Mauro
Lead Character Artist - Antonio Esparza
Character / Asset Artist – Mihailo Radosevic
Character Artist – Sergi Bigorda
Rigging and Additional Modeling – Lucas Salamon
Matte Painting / Environment TD – Steven Cormann
Motion Capture and Animation – Take One
Environments / Animation / Lighting / Compositing – Sava Zivkovic
Music by - Iz Svemira
Sound Design / Audio Production - Marko Zivanovic / Devotion Studios
Voice Talent - Bogdan Milosevic
Voice Talent – Aleksandra Pavlovic
TM & © 2021 HUXLEY LLC. All Rights Reserved.
THE STORY
In late 2019 I’ve had a pleasure of meeting Ben Mauro at Playgrounds Berlin, after years of following and admiring his work online. What followed was a passionate exchange of ideas and a rather obvious shared admiration for all things sci-fi.
We’ve already expressed the desire to collaborate on something, but what I wasn’t aware of was that Ben has already been working on his own sci-fi epic called HUXLEY for quite some time, and he was looking for ways to take his designs and illustrations in the world of animation.
This is where our interests aligned even more so, the desire to craft something unique that would get audiences inspired and excited in similar ways as the original Star Wars or Mad Max have inspired us. Therefore, we decided to embark on this journey of bringing HUXLEY to life, and not just in this short trailer form, but also the upcoming longer format films that are currently in development.
PROCESS
Needless to say, a lot of work went into the creation of the trailer for HUXLEY, and I’m very happy to present some of that work here.
If you’d like to go even further and learn about my process in detail, consider supporting me on Patreon where I’ll be breaking down every step of production for this trailer, presented in monthly hour long narrated video lessons.
PRE-PRODUCTION
The Creative
The world of HUXLEY is huge, and from the moment I’ve read through some of the work in progress pages, I knew I wanted to focus on the sprawling vastness of the world and the many characters that inhabit it. In essence this piece was thought of as being a true trailer, and instead of trying to convey a complex story I rather wanted to focus on quick moments and glimpses of the story and the world, always teasing and never revealing too much, in an effort to excite and leave the audience wanting more.
2D Animatic
The process of creating the 2D Animatic was essential in laying out the foundation of the trailer. Given that I was working with Ben’s pages I was able to explore a lot of different moments from the story, and quickly iterate to find the right combination, a much faster and intuitive experience than usual.
3D Previz
With the 3D Previz my main concern was retaining the pacing of the 2d animatic as much as possible. Unlike my previous short film work, with this trailer the pacing was set in the 2D stage with the first edit, and there was little room to expand that. We did however end up extending the edit ever so slightly to accommodate for mocap performance but for the most part the original pacing was preserved.
This stage was also the building block of camera work and cinematography rules, alongside scene layout. The world of HUXLEY is huge, massive discarded machines fill the landscape, hollowed out spaceships provide refuge as futuristic slums, engine remnants towering over the make-shift street vendor cabins. Everything about this barren world felt oppressive to me and I wanted to convey that with the cramped scene layout and compressed lens choices, building atop a building, towering and imposing on our characters that somehow always feel small.
CHARACTERS / PROPS
One of the main challenges with the project was the sheer amount of hero characters we had to produce. This required a slight expansion of the team and a lead artist role to oversee the many different production steps. My good friend Antonio Esparza took on this role and was able to lead a small team of artists into creating all the characters from scratch. Antonio’s responsibilities included complete character creation as well as implementing feedback and managing the rest of the team. Furthermore, to achieve the visual consistency, Antonio singlehandedly textured all of the characters and props. Alongside Antonio we had the help of my good friend Mihailo Radosevic and Sergi Bigorda providing the much needed asset creation support.
Huxley
Base geometry modeling was done by Lucas Salamon.
Character sculpting, UVs and texturing was done by Antonio Esparza.
Max
Initial body sculpt, base mesh modeling, and face sculpt were done by Sergi Bigorda.
Second pass of body sculpt, base mesh modeling, UVs and texturing were done by Antonio Esparza.
Kai
Initial body sculpt, base mesh modeling, and face sculpt were done by Sergi Bigorda.
Second pass of body sculpt, face sculpt, base mesh modeling, UVs and texturing were done by Antonio Esparza.
Karmak
The entire character including sculpting, base mesh creation, UVs and texturing was done by Antonio Esparza.
Guard
The entire character including sculpting, base mesh creation, UVs and texturing was done by Antonio Esparza.
Guard Rifle
Base mesh creation, sculpting and UVs were done by Mihailo Radosevic
Texturing was done by Antonio Esparza.
Scrape
Base mesh creation, sculpting and UVs were done by Mihailo Radosevic
Texturing was done by Antonio Esparza.
Demon
The entire character including sculpting, base mesh creation, UVs and texturing was done by Antonio Esparza.
Additional first pass leg sculpting was done by Sergi Bigorda
Additional base geometry modeling was done by Lucas Salamon
Onyx
Base mesh creation, sculpting and UVs were done by Mihailo Radosevic
Texturing was done by Antonio Esparza.
RIGGING
All characters were rigged by the amazing Lucas Salamon, who created all of our humanoid, alien, and robotic rigs in Maya. The rigs were transferred to the TakeOne for motion capture, but we could retain all of the controls in the Maya rig after the mocap animation was applied. Given the limited facial performance our characters had, we’ve opted for blend shape controlled faces, instead of a full facial rig which would have been wasted on this particular project.
Lucas was involved early on throughout the modeling process for key robot characters, providing his input and solving potential design and movement problems early on with Antonio, which has made the whole rigging process much more streamlined.
Apart from Lucas, Mihailo Radosevic rigged the ONYX craft during his modeling process.
ENVIRONMENTS
One of my most time consuming tasks was building all of the full CGI environments seen in the trailer. The world of HUXLEY has a very unique design, and my intention was to completely stay true to that design, and this ruled out any use of premade models when it came to the overall environmental structures. Therefore all of the environments were completely hand modeled from scratch in 3ds max and an additional sculpting detail pass was done in zbrush. For small scale detail like junk and debris I’ve used the kitbash set from David Lesperance and Andrew Averkin, these were then scattered around the scene with forest pack.
The world of HUXLEY is old and dirty, every single surface has layers and layers of patina, rust, dirt, and oil leakage. One of my biggest goals with this project was to get an overall visually consistent look in terms of how the surfaces were treated. Substance painter was absolutely an essential tool in getting that visual consistency across all assets, environment and character alike. The advantage of creating a smart material and repurposing it to different assets has sped up the process quite significantly, as the material could automatically conform to any given mesh, and provide the same overall results I was after.
DIGITAL MATTE PAINTING
For the wide environment vista shots we were lucky enough to have the support of my good friend Steven Cormann, an amazing Matte Painter/Environment TD. The following shots were a combination of roughly 70%-80% full CGI environment work that Steven took on himself with some additional matte painting he did on top.
I was then able to take on the shots and implement the remaining CG elements in compositing, like the main Onyx ship, characters, and foreground elements.
MOTION CAPTURE / ANIMATION
This project marked yet another collaboration with Take One, a local motion capture and animation studio. Our actors were my close friends Nebojsa Jez and Milan Nikolic, and together they performed all the characters in the trailer. Having only two actors required splitting some scenes with multiple characters in two takes, which were then merged together in animation.
Below is the Motion Capture edit with proxy characters.
Animation was one of the easier tasks on this project as we weren’t dealing with too complex motion and the overall duration of character animation was rather short. Once the mocap solve was delivered, I did a second pass of animation polish on the smaller scale detail on the characters in order to add additional weight and secondary animation, as well as facial animation and fixing cut-troughs. Additionally, the city scenes were brought to life with the use of Anima, a simple crowd simulation standalone software, with some off the shelf character assets.
Below is the final Animation edit.
RENDERING
The entire project was rendered with Redshift, which proved again to be an incredibly powerful, stable and production friendly render engine. Even on my fairly old workstation, Redshift was able to eat through everything I threw at it, complex scenes with crowds and multiple hero characters, massive amounts of 8K UDIM textures and VDBs.
Steven Cormann also used Redshift to render out his Matte Painting shots which helped tremendously in keeping the visual consistency when it came to rendering.
Every element within the full CGI scenes was rendered together in a single pass, meaning the characters and environments, with 3d motion blur and depth of field, which really helped minimize the compositing work later on. Average render times were going anywhere from 2 to 3 minutes per frame on simpler scenes, whereas some of the more complex crowd scenes peaked at 7 minutes per frame on a 4x EVGA 980ti Hybrid workstation.
COMPOSITING
As per usual, I’ve relied heavily on compositing in After Effects when it comes to the final look of the image. Roughly 70% of the look was achieved in lighting and render, but the final 30% done in comp were absolutely crucial in achieving the cinematic images I was after. I’ve rendered out EXR sequences with just a few render passes like material ID, Zdepth, Emissive and Specular which were combined in various ways to alter the image. Zdepth pass is my favorite element as it allows me to completely rebuild the atmospheric look in comp with plenty of freedom.
Apart from the render pass compositing and overall grading, another crucial element with compositing process was FX. Roughly 90% of the FX were all done in After Effects with a combination of built in tools, stock footage, and various plugins. Some key 3d FX like ship smoke trails were simulated in Blender and added in comp.
MUSIC AND SOUND
One of my closest collaborators Iz Svemira composed the music track for HUXLEY. Taking inspiration from the post-apocalyptic look of the world he focused on heavy metallic sounds within the score and almost tribal quality to the drum hits.
Complete sound design, Foley recording, voice over recording and final mixing was helmed by my friend Marko Zivanovic through his company Devotion Studios. We’ve worked with two local voice over actors, Bogdan Milosevic and Aleksandra Pavlovic who brought our characters to life.
STILLS
POSTER
I’ve had a pleasure of designing my version of the poster for HUXLEY, heavily inspired by the original Star Wars poster by Tom Jung. I’ve always wanted to pay homage to one of my all-time favorite posters from my favorite franchise, and HUXLEY felt like a perfect opportunity to do so.
TEASER
Aside from the main trailer, a separate teaser was made and released back in 2020, announcing the project at LightBox Expo.
THANK YOU
Thank you for taking the time to digest all of the additional material for HUXLEY! I hope you have enjoyed the trailer as much as we have enjoyed making it, and I truly hope these behind the scenes glimpses have helped you on your artistic journey in any way.
If you’d like to stay up to date with the crew, feel free to follow our Instagram accounts bellow.
