REBELS Pre-Production

15/12/2025

Pre-Production Introduction

This article details the pre-production phase of our university short film, REBELS. It includes information about our location scouting, pre-vis work, concept art, and creating light probes and lookdev scenes.

Getting Started

The idea for REBELS began in late November of 2024. We were sitting in class watching some of the winning short films from Bournemouth, Hertfordshire and ArtFX, and we decided that if wanted to make something of high quality we would have to start prepping as soon as possible.

We originally had 2 different ideas before we landed on REBELS. We all loved sci-fi and wanted to make something that reminded audiences of The Creator or Star Wars, we also saw that REBELS would tick all the boxes for the roles we all wanted to persue.

Our team also loved Visual Effects, and we wanted to make something that involved some sort of “real” element to it.

We then began writing the script and storyboarding some ideas.

Location Scouting

By January 2025, we had a rough idea of the story we wanted to tell, but we weren’t sure how and where we were going to film it

At first we wanted to film at Winspit Quarry in Dorset, however after seeing that our risk assessment forms would never be approved, we started looking for safer locations.

One of which was Cheddar Gorge, Somerset. We loved its beautiful landscape and location. We also saw that not many films and shows have used Cheddar Gorge and we wanted to profit off it’s uniqueness (Ironically, around that time we heard that filming for 28 Years Later was going to take place there).

We visited Cheddar Gorge in early February to see if shooting there was possible. We found some perfect spots for filming and returned home with enough data (and Cheddar cheese!) to start our pre-vis.

Pre-Visualization

Once we returned, we began processing our data and working on a pre-vis animatic. The animatic helped us decide what sort of lenses we would need, what time of day we should shoot, and what sort of VFX we would need.

Note: Alot of our animatic was changed due to shot complexity and time constraints, however our plot was left untouched.

Concept Art

We wanted to approach REBELS in a similar way to how Gareth Edwards did The Creator by deciding on concepts after the shoot.

We knew the general shapes and sizes of our subjects decided to jump straight into filming before we began figuring out how our assets would look.

This technique worked amazingly for us as we were able to progress with production before our concepts were finished.

We worked closely with Gabriel Drummond, a concept artist friend of ours who was also entering his final year of university at Norwich University of the Arts. Throughout the Summer he created concepts for the all the primary assets, as well as designed the titles and logo for us.

We decided on a mix of WW2 and Diesel Punk. We wanted a nice grungy sci fi feel.