Galactic Mjölnir

I am so proud to call myself good friends with Meng Wang. He is an insanely talented sculptor at Ringling College: by far the greatest in the school when it comes to anatomy and the human body. Recently, he posted his final senior thesis, a 3-person trailer project pitting vikings against elves... in space. The idea is so Gabriel!

I helped my friend figure out the viking character's materials and some of the holograms on the opening scene. I also helped with experimenting surfaces for the ship, and experiments with the lighting. I managed to recreate what looked like a NASA Space Shuttle receiving plenty of sunlight with stark shadows and almost no indirect illumination at all, but it looked almost too realistic and didn't fit with the darker themes of the project. I also saw early footage of this trailer and suggested the camera move slower to heighten the sense of scale. Cameras have to move very fast around a large object if you want to swing around it. In real life, that kind of fast movement is impossible, and the point of such movement is not to convey breakneck speed, so the end result is it just makes the objects seem much smaller than they truly are. But slower movements and lower FOVs seem much more epic. This trailer also looks amazing when fully lit.

I am so proud of my good friend. I wish him all the best.

Galactic Mjolnir from Kevin Reichwein on Vimeo.