Pikku’s breath

The film about  Pikku and his hunt for true love takes place in the winter. It’s dark, polar night and cold. If you have been here this time of the year, you know that each breath you take is clearly visible.

When Pikku is outside his breath need to show up, wich is a problem since he is a puppet that can’t really breathe and even if he could breathe, everything is shot indoors, where it’s warm.

So instead of building a smoke machine into Pikku’s throat, I decided to use hyper voxels in Light Wave 3D for the breath. I started by quickly tracking the nose-mouth area of Pikku with a null in LW. I then attached a particle generator to it. I timed his breath to where I thought it would be logical for him to breathe. When rendered I combined the breath with the video in After Effects.