Unit 5 - Where are we? Building the future

Deciding the Shot:

I had lots of ideas for this and did struggle at first to decide on the shots that I wanted. At first I was going to do a shot from 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle' (2017) in Poppy's Diner where the legs are in the meat grinder but I then remembered the Film 'The Shape of Water' (2017) as I felt that the lighting was more interesting in this shot and I think I could challenge myself in terms of modelling and the lighting of the scene.

I did speak to Molly and get her opinion on the change and she did agree with my decision to change from 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle' to 'The Shape of Water'.

I had done this before I had changed my mind about doing 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle'. I am quite pleased with how I was able to use the references below and used them to create this floor plan that I would've used.

Scene Reference:

Blockout:

The first thing I did was blockout where most of the furniture was going and to sort out the lighting. The easiest part of the lighting for me was the Key light and the fill lights. I struggled trying to get the backlight to match the shot reference image.

This is the blockout without the backlight as I couldn't find away to make the the backlight I was using into a hard light. The shadow produced was always very diffused and I started getting frustrated at how I couldn't find a way to fix this issue,

So I spoke to Molly about my lighting issues about the window, as the light wasn't coming through properly. She just toggled the shadows button in the Ray Visibility tab of object properties which fixed my problem.

I also added an area light in the left corner to brighten the back as in the first blockout I did it was too dark compared to the reference. I also added spot lights on the back wall to imitate the reflections from the bathroom.

Modelling & Texturing:

While I was figuring out the backlighting problem, I started modelling parts of the furniture in the scene. I first started with the chandelier as I wanted to get it over and done with because I thought it would be really tricky with the chains. I decided to use toruses to make the chains as I thought they would be easier to use than trying to manipulate cubes into that shape.

I then moved onto the shelf in the back left corner as I knew this would be a pretty easy thing to model and texture as I made it with a cube and a cylinder and used the boolean modifier to create the separate shelves and the feet of the shelf. I then beveled the edges to create the curve on the shelves.

The door was another quick thing to model. I just used a cube to make the actual door and extruded the face nearest the camera indents on the door. The hook on the door looks a little funny but I couldn't figure out a way to create the the swooping connection with the bottom part of the hook.

The coat rack was another easy thing to model with it being mostly made of cylinders. It was easy to UV unwrap and texture too.

basically made with cylinder, torus and sphere

The most annoying part of the scene was modelling the biscuit tins because of how many of them there were. They were easy to model though. I just used a cylinder and a cube to make the shapes and sized them differently according to the reference image. To make the edging at the bottom and where the lid is I added some edge loops and sized them up to make the base.

The vacuum cleaner was one of the things I was least looking forward to model because of the complexity of the shapes needed for the vacuum cleaner. I noticed that the vacuum in the scene looked similar to the vacuum cleaner at home so I asked my mum if she could take a photo of it so I could use it as a reference to help me model it because in the shot reference the vacuum was hard to see.

Scene Render & Green Screen:

I added in some fog behind the scene to create the darkness outside. After rendering this image I suddenly realised that I made the cube for the fog too long on the z axis so you can't see the light shadow on the floor which has annoyed me a little bit but if I had enough time to re-render the green screen and this image I would shorten the height of the fog cube.

I also had some issues with importing the green screen as a plane. After keying the green screen and importing it, the plane was transparent out of scene, but in the scene, where it was supposed to be transparent but it was black [see below].

Shoutout to Rachel who helped me realise that I hadn't checked the values on the light paths panel. As soon as she pointed this out to me everything was fixed when I changed the transparency level from 12 to 4. Silly me!

This is the VFX breakdown. I added sound to the mp4 file as I thought this would help make the whole thing feel more real and add ambience to the video.

Processes & Decisions