Director and visual artist Alex Le Guillou in Paris: “These sequences are my contribution to the documentary feature film “The Giants: The Extraordinary Story of Bob Brown and the Forest” – where I had the chance to illustrate the majestic trees of Tasmania using Lidar data captured from the ground and by drone.

“My role was to create multiple contemplative or informative sequences to illustrate different behaviors of trees (growth, communications, interconnections, protection, water circulation, etc). The sequences were inserted into the documentary among the real sequences in order to propose a new vision of the forest.

“For the creation of the sequences, once the point clouds were processed and optimized, I used real-time creation tools like Notch and Unreal Engine. This way I could experiment visually much faster and keep spontaneity throughout the creation phase. In the end, I exported 85 sequences and variations in 4K resolution, to let the team choose the best framing during editing.

“It took a lot of experimentation, both technical and visual processing on point clouds and exchanges with the directors to succeed in finding graphic treatments adapted to the behaviors and associated with the narrative of the film.

“This project was a very inspiring and enriching experience concerning fundamental subjects of our time.”
 
 

 
Client: General Strike, Matchbox Pictures
Director: Laurence Billiet, Rachael Antony

Artist/animator: Alex Le Guillou
3D forest scanning: Leonard Hambrecht, Arko Lucieer @ University of Tasmania

Toolkit: Unreal Engine, Notch, After Effects