Animated Short- Personal Development-Environment and Lighting -Portfolio Page

After the modelling process I then began looking at the environment that the short would be shot in as this has been mainly what my research has been about I’m not surprised that I ended up working on the environment. As the short is within a park holding a funfair I began by placing the models into the scene and then began resizing them according to what I thought looked right then I began adding in some of the foliage.

Up until this point this is what I have added in I’m still waiting for Caitlin’s assets to be added to really bring out that carnival theme as she will be producing more of the larger pieces within the environment such as the Ferris wheel and car isle.

Renders of initial environment-

Slightly improved version-

Ground change-

take 2 img2take 2 img1

Update #3-

Cloud cover-

Update#4-

More foliage-

Yeah

Update #5-

More  foliage, slight changes to asset locations-

Final Update #6-

Render of final scene-

3 copy

My next step was to look into the cinematography to research into the way that we would light the environment for the animated short. First I started by looking into some films that I thought were very inspiring.

Drive-

Django Unchained-

Django Unchained (2012) Blu-ray Screenshot
Django Unchained (2012) Blu-ray Screenshot

Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind-

8daf5aa0b5e28255638624b517cc5200--eternal-sunshine-film-stills

After asking my teammate about what sort of lighting effect we wanted the environment to have, as you can see from the images above I tend to go for the oranges and the blues for some reason I just tend to like the color palettes. But after the discussion with Mateja she envisioned the enviroment to be light and airy to which I fully agree so below is the videos that represent what I was feeling and also the research I did further after talking with Mateja.

First Animated Short light research-

These were selected due to the research that was conducted above on the type of tones that I thought the would look nice in the animated short. These screenshots were taken from the animated shorts- Scarlett and The Elephant in the room.

Second Animated Short light research-

After talking with Mateja about what she envisioned for the environment lighting I got a good understanding on what we wanted to achieve. Above are some screenshots from animated shorts such as Big Buck Bunny , Rubbish Robot, Rusty Robot, and In a heartbeat

After showing these to the team they really liked the screen grabs that I had took from the shorts above. After discussing what we would do next we decided to leave the lighting to the last step. So I then began looking into the camera mainly focusing on depth of field as we wanted the main focus to be on the balloons below is the video I used.-

This step was actually kept for the final version which I’m extremely happy about as I really liked this affect. The final renders using this technique were really pretty and pristine, after messing around with the settings we finally settled on what settings we wanted to use for the short and the final renders look really nice. (These can be scene in the Camera Portfolio on my blog).

Reflection-

Looking back to the start of building this project for the team I was uncertain to how it was going to look and  I just started by adding in my assets to the project and went from there. I quite like the layout of the park as I think it represents what we wanted to achieve by hosting a funfair, I think when we added the height through the Ferris Wheel and the Car isle it really brought through the funfair theme.

As the project started to grow and our ideas were flourishing the project got more adventurous and then we started to really test are limits to what we could do and how we could improve the short film. As the weeks went bye and presentations had to be presented I was quite nervous to how this idea was going to be received. When classmates were telling us after presentations that our idea was good and that we were doing a great job I started to believe in our project a bit more and started to really enjoy working on our idea.

References-

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