Comandante – andrea zu

Comandante is a World War II movie directed by Edoardo De Angelis that opened 2023 Venice Film Festival.

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I put together and directed the VAD, Virtual Art Department team, working between Production Design and Visual Effects.
We designed and built virtual vehicles, landscapes, ocean, skies, props.
The VAD team works mostly in a realtime computer graphics environment.
This enables interactive visualization and design of sequences and shots.

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During pre-production previsualization live sessions with Director, DP and Production Design are managed by VAD and the final goal is to visualize and understand the action and scene blocking.
Everything was laid out and simulated inside Unreal Engine and Unity.

On-set I provided art and technical direction for virtual production - NRT workflow by Kevin Tod Haugh vfx.
Unreal live realtime output allowed the Director and film crew to interact with the virtual world and vfx.
VAD team was also responsible for visualization, art and technical planning of set (techviz).

Interactive lighting output from 3d Unreal scene mapped to DMX light fixtures was set up to achieve full coherence between virtual and real elements.

Lidar scan and photogrammetry were employed to create a perfect digital double of the 73 meters long Cappellini submarine.

Sky capture was essential for VFX integration: VAD in collaboration with Bottleship VFX developed a custom workflow to capture a 360° HDR sky every 30 minutes during shooting.

Theses skies captures were then automatically stitched, cleaned up and put into the asset library.
Director, DoP and Production Designer could later on choose the best looking sky for each scene or use the real sky that was there during a specific take.
The sky was also imported live into Unreal to be able to have a coherent looking realtime scene during shooting.

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Directed by Edoardo De Angelis
Produced by Pierpaolo Verga

Production Design - Carmine Guarino
Cinematography - Ferran Paredes Rubio
Visual Effects - Kevin Tod Haugh

Andrea Zucchetti - Virtual Art Director
Riccardo D'Amico - Vfx Executive Producer
Aurora Lu - Vfx Coordinator
Arianna Natale, Laconic - Talent Management
Mario Monteiro - VAD Lead Vehicles Modeler
Matteo Ferrario - VAD Technical Modeler
Alessandro Surace - VAD Texture Artist
Pierluigi Ricci - VAD 3d Artist
Gabriele Stigliano - VAD 3d Artist
Fabrizio di Palma - 3D Animator
Toni Bacila - Qtake operator
Basilio Puglia - BTS film
DIT by Colorshape
VFX by Hristo Helev, Bottleship VFX
VFX by Das Alter Lager VFX
Compositing by Wow Tapes
3D scan by Entracte
Virtual cinematography by Habib Zargarpour, Unity Technologies
David Stump ASC
Cooke Optics
Andrew Voller
Highres
The Foundry

Thanks to all the film crew