Porque Hay... - Israel Fornes

Fact File Name Israel Fornes Product Vue Infinite, Electric Image, Silo "Vue opens me a new way to include vegetation and real life landscapes in my projects!"

The shortfilm "Porque hay cosas que nunca se olvidan" is a LMFFILMS project, directed by Lucas Figueroa. Israel Fornés worked on the title credits, special effects and created the opening sequence with Vue.

Synopsis

Napoles, Italy. 1950.
Four friends play soccer on the street. Suddenly the ball falls inside "Evil grandma's" house. They probably won't play with this ball again, but the revenge will be terrible...

I've known Lucas since "Boletos Por Favor", his previous shortfilm, and since then we became good friends. When we finished "Boletos Por Favor" we started thinking about this new project and I got involved in many parts of it.

I was on location the filming days to guide in every post-production aspect. I did many photos for HDR material, VR images, textures, etc. I worked for about a year on this project, but I had to share time with other projects or I would have had to leave my house and live under the bridge!!! This project is also personal because I spent many time and effort to have it done.

Technical aspects

The idea was to connect real footage with a 3D valley with a jail.

I found nice DEM mountains on the Internet and I loaded them in the terrain editor to edit them. I then populated the valley with nice moving trees and clouds. Just placing clouds and adding some wind in atmosphere gave the project the final touch. The moving tree leaves, DEM import, wind, atmospherical situations, clouds, are really great features of Vue.

Thanks to Vue's option to export camera animation I could render other pieces in different software. For the jail, I used Electric Image for the render and Silo for modeling. This option to share the project with other 3D packages and blend results in a compositing software is fantastic.

I made different valley designs and flythroughs until we got the finished one. In the begining I did something more like a Lord of the Rings mood, with many clouds and dense ambience, but we finally changed it to a bright day using nice clouds I photograph on the set.

Working for tv, with low budgets, you don't have a lot of time to complete a project. You only have a few days to explore all the emotional results to get the final image. Every situation turns into another and you have to improvise to get the best of what you have.

The ability to make new environments/scenes in minutes is a strong side of Vue. It opens a new way for me to include vegetation and real life landscapes in my projects. It is awesome to control the work and be able to say Yes to clients when in the past the answer would have been No.

About the Artist

My name is Israel Fornés. I am 35 years old and was born in Madrid, Spain. I work in the fields of motion graphics, VFX and post-production for TV and film. Occasionally, I also work for newspapers, websites and DVDs.

I started working with computers (Macintosh) in 1991. I  soon got interested in 3D, because it gave me the opportunity to render situations that I couldn't afford with live action, and so on. I know Vue since it's first release, but started using it in Version 5 (Vue 5 Infinite).