Golden Square Digs Deep For The West Plus Worm
Theo Delaney’s spot for West Plus compost starts off as a common or garden horticultural programme but soon gets surreal as a worm bursts into song with a belting performance that would rival any big stage presence. Golden Square designed the worm character in 3D, taking care to strike the right balance between deadpan comic realism and character cuteness.
Originally the singing worm was meant to be realistic but have the gusto of an iconic singer so as to create an odd juxtaposition for deadpan comedic effect. So initial designs played around with positioning and look of the worm’s eyes and mouth; keeping its features as realistic as possible with black beady eyes, for example. However, over a period of four weeks, the worm went through several design evolutions and ended up with more character assets like Pixar-style white eyes.
Once the character’s design was agreed on, it was hand-drawn, scanned and painted for presentation. Then came texture work which had to convey shiny but translucent rings. The animation rig took a while develop because it had to be flexible enough to animate the worm’s human-like behaviour, but without any human movement reference points like limbs or hips. In short, any part of the worm could be animated, which had a knock-on effect on the texturing process because the worm’s overall shape and length could be changed significantly, meaning texture rings had to be adjusted accordingly. Lighting was established using HDR (high dynamic range) images from the set for reference.
The worm was composited in Flame, with most of the lighting and texturing supplied as one 3D pass. Mark Beardall finished off the composite with shadows, grading and defocusing to bed it in properly, whilst adding grain to match the rest of the footage. Mark also used Flame for clean-up (like removing tracking markers) and to increase the volume of flowers in key shots (using elements from the same shot to help consistency).