The film “Guards of Kamchatka ” is telling about the defense of Petropavlovsk in 1854 during the Crimean War. It was shown in the cinemas in October 2018.

     The TV anchorman Valdis Pelsh tells about the history of the defense of Petropavlovsk in the film, actors Xenia Rappoport and Dmitry Pevtsov read the hero diaries. Filming took place in Kamchatka, on the ship-party to the events of Trincomalee, in Hartlepool, as well as in St. Petersburg and Peterhof.

     In this film you will  find the history of how, at the height of the Crimean War, in the summer of 1854, a squadron of six French and British ships arrives in Petropavlovsk - the eastern border of the country, cut off from the capital of the Russian Empire three months' journey, with a population of 1531 people and a very small garrison. On their sides, the 212 guns and the 2250 man are well-equipped professional military men and sailors. This did not stop the residents of Petropavlovsk, who decided to give battle to uninvited guests.

    Our team created more the 4 minutes for pure full CG content showing navy battles and maneuvers of the ships in the harbor of Petropavlovsk. We also did some set-extension and mattepaint-cleaunps in live plates. 

    We did created 9 ships in a very short amount of time. The client provided us some geometry and textures but there were still tons of lookdev and FX work to do. Here are turntables of some of them.

    Assuming the fact we had quite calm sea without heavy waves we decided to avoid per shot simulation of sails and ropes and created cached loop simulations for both elements for each ship.

We created pre-cached seamless seascape to integrate ships onto it.

    We had lots of FX to be done in a very short amount of time. One of the most seen effect is water interaction with ships. Assuming similar water line shape of all our ships we did the same trick as with SeaLookdev - long-loop 3d mesh cache and foam particles that can be linked to any of the ship.

3D water exlosion library

For quick and efficient work build precached 3D explosions with water mesh and volume data

The same we did for ground explosions

And the same for the gunfires.

We`ve started from scratch creating storyboard and previz. In this gallery you may see selected pics from the storyboard.

There is a block of explaining video of the geography and choreography. The was an nice location in library and we`ve added interactive miniature map on top of the table.

Pavel Ivanov