My Tiny Octopus Teacher : VFX Breakdown

Production : Netflix
Director : Jean-Pierre Jeunet
3D Artist / Compositing : Florian Senand
Animmator : Brice Bergeret
Particles : Jérôme Oliveras

This shot is destinated to a commercial for Netflix and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

After 2 weeks of back and forth to validate a camera movement that allows to see all what the director wanted to show in an only 7 seconds shot (the optic cable, the water surface, the octopus facial emotion and the tear), the real work began.

I spent a lot of time to make this Octopus, which is the one of "My Octopus Teacher" ("La sagesse de la pieuvre" en français), tiny.
I used ZBrush, and substance painter for this part.

But the real difficulty for me has been to rig it.
I'm not a rigger, and to make this piece alive, I used hundreds of bones and aa XPresso programming tag to allow the tentacles to twist and curl independently of FK animation.
I also sculpted a lot of morphs for the eyes, to let the animator choose the most appropriate one later.

The rendering and the compositing wasn't an easy part too.
First of all, the light doesn't beahave under water like on the surface.
Most of IOR are negative, the light is scattered by the water and produce some effects difficult to reproduce in a 3D scene, like a variation of the light color depending on the distance from the camera, and a vanishing of this light that transform all the background in a ghost land.

Actually, the octopus was supposed to be photorealistic, but also to have a human behave and to cry underwater.
Impossible to do without falling in the uncanny valley, and impossible to do with this kind of accelerated camera movement.
Moreover, the short focal lens choosed to show all the important elements of the scene mentionned before is not credible in an underwater environment, because a camera act like an human eye with a diving mask.
The air between the sensor and the lens + the air of the waterproof box lead to a difference of IOR of 1.33 (plus the glass), that mean that everything is at least 1.33 times bigger (a F 24, beacame a F32 for example).

So I decided to increase the "Kawaii" aspect of the animal and to focus on the esthetic more than the photorealism of the atmosphere.
I played with a really clear water, caustics, godrays, reduced the DOF and the motion blur to see the cable and to read the scene perfecly in this so short shot.
A 3DsMax animator, who was working on a second completly different shot for this same commercial, helped me by giving to me 3 days of is talent to make this octopus alive.
By the way, he didn't know Cinema 4D and had to learn during theses day to deliver this animation, so thanks a lot !

Finally, after two months of work, I'm proud to show you this breackdown base on a bit longer version of the shot that I have made for myself.