Remember that lightning can only happen in an unbalance atmosphere. Between multiple days of no sleep, a trip to Morocco and hours of rendering, I’m proud to have been a part of this wonderful production team.

When Caraz first talk to me about her idea, I knew from the moment that it was going to be very exciting to work on those clouds.

GENERATING A STORM

There is a lot that goes into a simple storm. The movement of rain and ice inside a thundercloud creates an electrical charge. At that point, the negative charge is formed at the bottom of the cloud and the positive charge at the top. Since opposites attract, the negative charge at the bottom of the cloud seeks out a positive charge to connect with.

Since I was on a relatively short deadline, I had to find an efficient way to generate different kinds of storms and lightning. Some of them were generated as xParticles system in C4D and I used the EXR with multiple passes to composite them afterwards.

For the moment the character discovers he is the one bringing the clouds and lighting to life, I used multiple assets generated from Houdini and C4D as well as clouds images that I input into Nukes particles system. Another simulation was then rendered inside of Nuke and the lightning  came from multiple animated lights in the 3D system.

Pulling the key was a lot harder than I first thought. Since the lens was more vintage, I had a very pronounced gloom and aberration happening on all the defocussed face. Hopefully, with some tuning and hue correction, I was able to rebalance the key and make it wrap nicely at the end.