DriveTime / Squid

Lead CG Harin Hirani gives a breakdown on the build, 'To give the feeling of being immersed underwater the camera drifts around as if it were being pushed by an ocean current. Small particles added into the water give the environment that extra three dimensional depth and hint to a rocky surface below.

Lighting anything that is supposed to look like it is submerged deep under water is a quite a challenge. Realistically, there wouldn't be any light sources that deep down. We took some creative licence to make it feel as it if were being shot by a camera crew with artificial lighting and by attaching some lights to the front of the submarine to help illuminate the body and make it look more theatrical. A little chromatic aberration lens effect was added in compositing to distort the image as it were being shot by a camera in water.

We referenced a lot of underwater luminescent sea creatures for the look and feel of our squid, but ultimately we wanted to create something that felt a little more fantastical and out of this world. We drove some textures through our squid to create a pulsing motion for the bio-luminescence and jittered the colours of the squid to help them look more varied.