These beautiful and eerie landscapes are part of a collaboration with photographer Andy Glass. The images were photographed at the Salton Sea, and provided the perfect backdrop on which to combine dystopian scavengers with the long-forgotten salt-corroded debris.

The location for the shoot was a lake resort that had been created by the accidental overflow of an irrigation project back in 1905. It became a successful tourist resort in the 50’s until a build up of agricultural runoff pollution massively increased the salinity of the lake. Now the area is home to a reducing band of die-hard residents who put up with the smell of huge numbers of decaying fish. Returning from the shoot, Andy lived with the images for a while, but always felt they needed a character element to really complete the narrative. We were keen to collaborate and our design team and character artists explored several ideas, before envisioning a world inhabited by machine-like predators prowling and hunting these abandoned structures. Once we had settled on a theme, we started to develop the types of animals that would reside in such a harsh environment.

We started the CGI process by exploring concept designs for the different kinds of animals we wanted to depict. These began as very rough sketch outlines, just to get a sense of proportions and design and to establish which animals would be best suited to each scene. Each animal is then designed with more and more details, taking into consideration the functionality of their construct and the look and feel of the materials used.

Once happy with our character designs, each animal is then sketched onto the backplate photography, exploring posing and composition, to show how the animals would interact within each scene. At this stage we can quickly explore colour palettes and lighting and start to get a sense of how they would eventually balance into each shot.

Once the concept designs are approved, we finalise detailed model sheets showing the different views of each animal and this allows our modelling team know the exact proportions and form of each component and how they connect into each other, in order to start building them in CGI.

We created many different types of metals and textures, ranging from clean surfaces to more rusty and corroded elements, which were then applied in varying degrees to each animal.

Each scene was camera matched in 3d to ensure the CG camera matched exactly the perspectives and lensing of the photography. We could then rig and position each animal accurately into any part of the scene, matching the time of day with our lighting to ensure a convincing and seamless integration.

Our robotic CG scavengers were carefully integrated into Andy’s photography so they felt very natural and believable once emerged in their stark surroundings. Our retouch team did an amazing job balancing the two elements to achieve this beautiful end result.

As part of the final post process the team worked closely with Andy to grade each shot, exploring different hues and colour palettes to set the mood and ambience whilst retaining the quality of light captured in the original photography. You can view several of the grade options explored for the vultures image below.