One of my favortie films that I've had the opportnutiy to VFX supervise, Outlander is an epic tale complete with spaceships, monsters, vikings and more...
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During the reign of the Vikings, Kainan, a man from a far-off world, crash lands on Earth, accidentally bringing with him an alien predator known as the Moorwen. Kainan befreinds and leads an alliance of Viking tribes to kill the Moorwen by fusing his advanced technology with their Iron Age weaponry. Directed by Howard McCain, Outlander stars Jim Caviezel as Kainan, Ron Pearlman and John Hurt as the Viking Clan leaders, and Sophia Miles and Jack Houston as up and coming viking leaders. We created over 640 visual effects shots for this film. There are some really exciting and unique vfx sequences that show off the Moorwen's terrifying "bioluminsesence" and the colonization and eventual destruction of its home planet. There was also a lot of matte painting and cg to create the earth world of the vikings, as well as other environmets including subteranian lava domes and the underwater crash site of Kainan's spaceship.
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| Above is some of the pre-production artwork done by Ninth Ray Studios. |
The baby Moorwen, just after being "born", as seen in a final frame from the film.
Notice the bioluminesence already emenating from it. This bioluminesensce idea truly made these aliens unique. We did a lot of research into undersea creatures, studying how they communicated... and hunted with it.
Above is the spaceship design done by Ian McCaig and the guys at Ninth Ray, and to the left, some of the development of one of the shots at the Moorwen Planet's spacesport.
It was a challenge to model the CG ship to match the subtle curvatures of Ian's design. Below are some of the notes that Howard and I did to help this process.
At right: an in-progress shot of the CG Moorwen. Shown with ambient occlusion and displacement textures, but not color.
Below are renderings of different stages of the iris and also detail shots of the whip-shaped tails. The Moorwen has a prehensile tail that acts as one of its main tools for hunting, so a lot of effort went into the design and animation of it.
