OTTO brought a sketch of an idea to the company where I had been a represented CGI artist at the time. The project was assigned to me because I’m a good fit for a job that requires creative input and a willingness to experiment.

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OTTO was very open to ideas, so I sketched out my idea for the image and collected a lot of images for a moodboard. Then, I created a rough previsualization version with stand-in geometry. We then worked together to refine exactly what it should look like and where everything should be placed. Once that was signed off on, OTTO went off to photograph the human model in the poses we had worked out, while I built, lighted and textured the scene. Then the photography and CGI were brought together within photoshop, and everything was polished up to create the final image.

Photorealistic people. Real life humans with all of their unique details and mannerisms. The human brain is very good at spotting when another human doesn’t look quite right. It’s part of our evolution as social creatures to spot outsiders as potential threats. More stylised characters in animation don’t set off that danger reflex as we can recognise that they’re not real people. However, when CGI gets close to looking real but isn’t 100%, then we feel uncomfortable. Hollywood, with their hundreds of millions of dollars in CGI budgets, is only now starting to be able to create photorealistic human characters that don’t make people’s skin crawl.

CGI was used to make a dream-like world where ideas take on their own life and paper is the medium through which that happens.

Interestingly, the strengths of CGI are the weaknesses of photography, and visa versa. CGI is great for making the impossible, the bombastic, the weird, but it’s poor (or at least very time consuming) when it comes to making a photorealistic man that’s in a cafe and talking to his wife. Photography is great for capturing humans and the world as it is, but it’s terrible (or at least extremely difficult) if you want to have a spaceship crashing into a planet. This is why we used photography and CGI together for the swatch book imagery. CGI for the far-out paper world, and photography for the human figures within it.

I think CGI allows ideas to be expressed with high-end production values much faster and with fewer practical limitations. Illustration, model building and, to some extent photography, can be done virtually and much more affordably. However, I think that as a culture we produce and consume a lot more media, so I think that there will always be a demand for the practical crafts in situations where CGI isn’t appropriate.

CGI software is always getting more powerful and more accessible. Ideas and projects that would have required large teams and months to complete can now be tackled by much smaller teams or even individuals. I see the future consisting of more independent artists and small companies that are able to offer a unique vision with greater production values to clients. This is made possible by the growing market of offsite render farms that tackle the heavy lifting of the computer work. This is something of a double-edged sword for the artists, as the expectation from clients grows along with the artist’s ability to deliver it.

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Simon Allan is a CGI director and artist with his own company, Giant Bonsai. www.giantbonsai.co.uk