More Texture Work on the Bunk

February 22, 2010 11:33 pm

Listening to AFX… Texturing the bunk. This is like the digital equivalent to knitting.

Bunk Textures

February 21, 2010 10:49 pm

Some texture work on the bunk.

Macklin Cellar Texture Adventures

February 15, 2010 6:18 pm

Macklin Street…  Me and Jim descended into the murky depths of the cellar at the weekend and pretty much documented every square inch of the place. It’s awesome down there… It used to be crammed full of old stuff, and weird stuff, like a boat engine and propellors etc. It was good to see it completely empty and actually be able to get around it without getting trapped.

I forgot to charge my camera batteries so Jim let me use his Canon DSLR and took a few shots himself.

Anyway, here’s a few:

There’s three rooms which are pretty nasty and then there’s this… A pristine white meat fridge with hanging hooks and a 30cm thick wooden door and Jim inside… straight out of an eighties slash horror movie.

Me in the cellar, taken by Jim Cork on his Hipstamatic iPhone.

Richard’s Bunk

February 13, 2010 11:25 pm

It’s around one hundred years since Captain Scott led the ill-fated expedition to reach the South Pole.

After many years of exploration, planning and exhaustion the Terra Nova Expedition to be the first to reach the south pole was preceded by the Norwegians by just thirty days. Scott and his party died on the return journey and before the other members of the expedition returned home, a wooden cross was constructed by the ships carpenter and inscribed witha line from Tennyson’s poem Ulysses: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”

I found some images of ‘Discovery Hut’ and ‘Scott’s Hut’ a few years ago and remember being deeply inspired by them. The hut’s are pretty much preserved exactly as they were left in the early 20th Century including slowly rotting seal blubber and a myriad of classic British branded goods such as Bird’s Custard and Fry’s Cocoa. So anyway… I collected hundreds of images of the handful of huts from this heroic era of exploration and discovery. Mainly from Seth White’s online journal.

Parts of these huts have found there way into the design of the environment where Horstmann resides so I thought it would be good to share the inspiration. One key element is Richard’s (Richard ‘Dick’ Richards) Bunk from the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which followed on from Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition. The bunk is on the far left of the image below.

A terrifying inscription on the bed reads: “RW Richards August 14, 1916 Losses to date: Haywood Mack Smyth Shak(?)”

It’s not important to the story at all, that the bunk has this background. In fact I don’t really want it to look like a bed. One shot will have the top of the mattress and the pillow in full view but I’ll possibly lose them in shadows or take them out for that particular shot if it’s too obviously a bed. I don’t really want it to feel to habitable as an environment. As much as inspired by the look and form of these images I feel the overall idea of this being Horstmann’s uncomfortable reality should be maintained beyond being faithful to these visual influence. I guess it’s just an interesting story. Well… Here’s the beginnings of Richard’s Bunk anyway.

Wooden Cupboard

February 10, 2010 10:00 pm

Just kicking back making a cupboard… Texturing in mudbox etc

I was thinking that cupboard is a strange word… Just looked it up and it turns out that ‘as the name suggests’ it’s a board for putting cups on. I never thought of that.

Construction Begins

January 26, 2010 11:50 pm

Whilst waiting for Biff to get creative on the lobe based artwork I’ve begun work on the modeling and texturing phase of the production.

My basic pipeline for this is 3ds Max for low poly versions, then Mudbox for any higher detail modeling and a mix of Mudbox and Photoshop for texturing. I always end up getting carried away with the texturing, usually wasting a good few hours working into parts of objects that aren’t visible to the camera. I do love texturing though… The hero objects are the more satisfying but there’s always good opportunity to add interesting details to the peripheral objects that help to build up the overall feel for an environment.

I got Total Textures V01 R2 from 3d Total for Christmas off my folks, which is extremely useful a starting point or for a blanket texture pass on all the elements in minutes. For the more important stuff I prefer to locate specific textures and surfaces. It’s time for a texture adventure. Yeah.

Dramatic Flow

January 23, 2010 6:25 pm

I forgot to post this. This is the dramatic flow of the film that has been visualised as a graph to aid Biff whilst creating the music. It can be very difficult to convey the different feelings and dramatic cues without words to assist, so this graphical script will hopefully communicate what Horstmann should be feeling and at what level throughout the film. It should give Biff a better understanding of what the music will be saying.

Horstmann Environment Concept Art

January 18, 2010 10:37 pm

Another concept image of Horstmann within his environment. This one is made up of twenty or so other images that have been sliced up, masked, transformed and merged into one image. I have also worked into the image with Photoshops painting tools. I think this image is lacking some detail around the periphery but overall it’s beginning to take shape. The coloured tendrils stand out really well despite the deep blue saturation within the shadows and darker areas.

Click for larger image.

Siege Concept Art

January 6, 2010 11:17 am

This is a concept image of what all the different elements in the film might look like together. The butterfly/colour tendrils element is a little weak but the overall effect is quite nice. Making these images is a quick way of seeing how a final shot may look and aid lots of decisions that might save time at this stage of the production. I can see from this image that the grimey look to the large flat areas will help fill the awkward spaces visible in the previs renders and detract from the peripheral objects as focal points within a composition. I want to be able to flatten the room as a vignette to the main focal points of the butterfly and the lamp so a constant level of detail throughout the frame will help control the movement of the eye throughout the frame.

This is the starting point for the image above. It’s a still shot from the previs environment. All the objects are simple proxy versions and only have basic colours applied. The lighting is basic yet is close to the way I want the lighting to work within most of the shots. The key lighting will be from Horstmann, it will be the main shadow caster and will vary slightly in colour depending on the mood but generally will be a warmer tungsten to give warmth to his character against the colder blue ambient lighting. I think each scene will be treated slightly different depending on the composition but generally this will be the starting point. I also want to have strange incedental lighting throughout, perhaps as oddly lit areas in places where there will be no logical source, almost as reflected light bouncing from objects out of sight. I’m thinking of building up the scenes with more glass objects to enforce this idea of light moving around the scene in a strange and unsettling way.

The following images are a selection of the main reference images used to build up the concept image above. They are all found off the internet at different times throughout the pre production phase, mostly google search results. The Lamp is from the first time I think I saw a Horstmann and Hadrill lamp, I found it on Ebay and instantly fell in love. I bid on it but soon realised that these lamps don’t sell cheaply.

As well as compositing parts of reference imagery together there is also a good amount of digital painting involved, mainly adding highlights in the correct places and working into the image to make it believable. Because i’m using my old PC at the moment I’ve not created any special brushes, so all the paint and clone work was done using Photoshop’s simple brush presets.

Previs First Pass Complete

December 30, 2009 4:59 pm

Christmas was ace and I got some lovely gifts including some short films, texture maps, and chutney. I’ve also had some misfortune as my Mac Book Pro has died. Co-incedentaly it happened as I was rendering the completed first pass of the previs edit. I’ve spent some time trying to fix it but now it just shows a death screen at startup. I’ll be sending it off to the apple workshop in the new year and hopefully it wont be expensive… although it seems to be a hardware issue so it will probably be extortionate. Anyway… I’ve brought my old PC back to life and fixed all kinds of problems, installed new bits of software, battled through continual crashes and finally have the previs edit I began exporting about a week ago.

The idea is that Biff takes a look at the previs and begins work of the music. Normally deadlines and budgets aren’t very forgiving when it comes to experimentation and play but seeing as there are no deadlines and no pennies in the pot we have as long as we like to try new methods and different ideas. One thing I have always been keen to do is work continually throughout a production with a musician and be able to pass visuals and sounds back and forth to achieve something that isn’t led by one or the other. Most often music is led by imagery, as typically the soundtrack to a film comes later in the production or imagery is led by the music as in music videos. Having worked with both of these structures there are very particular benifits with each and I know from experience and other peoples experience that it can be very difficult to integrate music and video in such a way as they feed off each other in their production.

Our sense of hearing more so than sight has the ability to tap into our emotions and feelings. My personal desire to tell stories without words and commonly with characters that have little in the way of expression can make it very difficult visually to communicate emotion. It is music and sound that I look towards to help portray the feelings and moods of the character. Without an idea of how much is possible with the music it is easy to over exagerate the movements of characters until they become very thespian like once the music is adde, so in order to inform movements of subtle ideosyncracies it is very beneficial to start experimenting with sounds and music as early as possible.

I have a lot to say about this subject but I am terrible at putting thoughts into words… The next pass in terms of the edit will be a musically informed one… The structure and the rhythm of the film will hopefully begin to take shape and allow the pictures and the music to harmonise with each other.