Exterior Shot 2 Scene 1

Map painted in Photoshop from brick-work asset design created during Pre-Production 

It's just enough that it's there to fill in an essential blank, but not too much that it will deter from the action in the frame. 

Excuse the darkness, but area's will be highlighted further down the line via Lighting, Displacement maps and utilising the use of fogging in frame. 

The Moon is a PNG image file created in Photoshop and saved without a background. This in turn, had made it easy to place our moon design into the frame wherever we need it. 

The set from above (above) 

The background silhouette buildings are simply the buildings created by Bo Lee at the start of Production and squashed down to be super thin, just to get our point across. 

The Moon is an Image Plane with one layer rendered, background excluded and exported as a PNG file. 

When imported and composed in the frame correctly, a glow with an intensity was added at an attribute of  0.150. 

As the image is background-less, the glow attribute only affects what is on show, in turn, this is the moon. And so, in turn, it’s a nice graphic- 2D looking moon, that works well in the scene, and will move as the camera moves, without the need to add it in in post-production. 

Whilst I was at first initially hesitant to use fog in the film, whilst working through the shots, and the way things have been composed, we have used it more as a stylistic weapon to mask up elements that we don't want the audience to see, and cinematically, it adds a very plausible element to the frame, where in the environment, the shapes and the environment are a little bit goofy and warped. So it's a nice balance to strike, and the blue really works in the way I wanted it to. It meant changing a few colour attributes in the attribute editor to literally create blue fog, but in complimentary with the blue textures lathered on the modelled attributes, it allows the night time element to the frame to consume itself in it's own colour palette, which I really enjoyed about it. It has this nice balance between, mysterious, goofy and friendly, with the animation that goes into frame as well, as goofy as it is, that itself will compliment the friendly aspect. With the wet concrete as well, it will help over-all create a collective moist, environment.

All in all, it strikes at a point that when an audience may expect it to turn left into a cold and ominous direction, it actually turns right, by instilling this wacky animation into the frame.

And all that essentially is essentially dangerous to look at when 'not in camera view', is fixed when actually in camera view, and the fog is in, and the textures are in, and all of the assets work off of one another as a nice and big collaboration.

"Man" Character Texture

Hand Painted In The Foundry's Mari (Mari2.5v2)

Eye Textures created in Adobe Photoshop CS5

Bank Wall Texture

Screenshots of it complimenting the Floor and other assets of the set. 

It's all essentially very bright. But It's marble, and the film itself is also set during the Night-Time period, so essentially in the Night-Time renders, we will get tonally and visually A great balance, between appealing and visually accessible, and also setting the mood. Seen as the lighting plays an integral part in this set, it was important to make the canvas as blank as we could so that yes, if we need to make changes, they would be very easy to make, and also make nothing too distracting, so that the painted elements of the textures would hold their own, yet simultaneously compliment both the modelling that Alice has created, and the Lighting assets that Mikey is creating, so that we get this really nice sense of unification between the dual roles, to create something that looks unique in it's own way. Mikey now at this stage has the completed set and his working his assets onto it. 

Bank Floor Texture

First Rendition 

This will be married together with the Marble shader that Mikey has created. 

Second Rendition - Just a little more visually interesting. The 4-Sided shape in the middle was disregarded for purely being 'Too Much' in the set, so I toned down the amount of things going on whilst still retaining the key visual interest in the circular shapes. 

Screenshot 

From the screenshot above, the simplicity seems to work better within the context of the set, so we'll stick to our guns on this one... 

More Shots

These shots aren't necessarily brimming with Animation, but need doing nonetheless! 

The above one demonstrates the dynamic "Snap-Zoom" Camera move, as hitting the 20 second mark of the movie, we discover where we're going to take the audience, and what's going to take place in the story. So to whoosh down this big-scale set to this one focal point, is quite a nice and contemporary way to demonstrate what's about to take place. It's a promise that we're going to take the audience there... Really soon! 

'HOW MUCH DYNAMITE???!'; The above shot could well be our Money shot. It's a juxtapose between the audience being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of dynamite in frame, striking a nice even tone between being crazy, and then indistinguishable - which in turn works with the ideology of the zany-ness of the style and substance, but it also sets up what the goal of the story is all about. To be frank, it just didn't look 'NUT'S' enough with very little dynamite, I feel like it really sell's this impenetrable Vault-door, in a way that we need A LOT of dynamite to get through it among other things.

This shot is all about opening the Vault Door, and opening it in the most interesting way, visually. Visual interest is key, and so we wanted a camera angle that would be both dynamically recogniseable and also a little bit abstract, getting them both to walk on a tight-rope together. When we utilise the depth of field, we'll get a really nice contemporary piece of camera work, that just shouts out everything that we want it to. This isn't a flat movie, so there's no reason why the camera work can't compliment that idea. 

Shot 2 (A-LOT-BETA)

After several revisions of this shot, we've settled on the movement of the above video play blast. 

Personally, I feel like now the car has a sense of weight to it, the cushioning and slow-ness at the top, gives it a bigger sense of weight, as an object with a bigger mass, rather than in previous attempts where the car actually bounces down from the top of the frame, it did lose momentum upon each level of impact, but there was a level of 'too-much' implausibility that I and many others found to be too distracting, plus it didn't slow down and there was no for the audience to try and distinguish what the object was. Although the film is like this, it was a bit too WHAM SMACK POW! and then just there smack in front of our face, and after consulting with our tutors, we made some adjustments, and get the car really slowing down in mid-air and it gave it that sense of weight whilst accompanying the  philosophy of wanting to make sure the car was seen, giving it that justification. In order to just make it a bit more wacky, to completely argue against the sense of physical plausibility that we've instilled back into the shot, we decided to give the wheels their own sense of character, giving them a nice delayed drag as so they don't move in such order with the body of the car. They're bouncing, they're not rolling and they're kind of out of their comfort zone, and that idea really excited me a little bit that  we were able to play around with that a little bit in a nice and goofy way. 

The fact that it comes up from the bottom of the frame, also works better in conjunction with the previous shot, because in the last frame, we wait for the dust-bin lid to flip back down before cutting to the next shot so in that time that the dust-bin lid is doing it's thing, the car's gone, and it's going elsewhere, so we wanted give it that sense, and having the car coming from the above, looked like it was coming down from the previous frame, which from an editors perspective, doesn't really give it a sense of linear time-flowing by. So it made more sense for us that whilst the dust-bin lid was showing off a bit, that the car had already hit the steep bottom of that hill and by the time we cut, it's on it's way back up, and it's almost towing because of it's weight. It seems obvious now, but it was important for us to get that right and really allow all of the elements to play in conjunction with one another. 

Monkey Character UV Map

In order to make sure that I could produce this character texture in the shortest amount of time, with the best possible hand painted result, that wouldn't show any seams, and above all, quickly and efficiently I decided to learn how to use Mari - A piece of software developed by The Foundry for the production of Avatar. It doesn't take much learning, as the main point of Mari is to be able to quickly generate quick UV Maps and then hand paint the textures onto the models in Realtime. After quickly getting to know the Hot-Keys and some basic in's and out's, I got started... 

Orthographic views and UV Map views are easy to utilise separately or together, however the artist chooses to view his/her work. 

An array of Photoshop brushes were created in Photoshop and uploaded to Mari to create some assets of the finished result. But Mari (Like Photoshop) has it's own custom set of Brushes that are easy to work with. 

This was all then exported as a TIFF map and uploaded to the model in Autodesk Maya. The export system is simple and works effectively in conjunction with Maya, so it makes for an all-round faster process during production, taking off many finicky weeks of trying to texture a character through Photoshop.

Shot 6 Layout

Updated Colourscript

After Effects Title

So we start with a base template in which we create the assets that will go into our scene. 

The logo was already created from Pre-producton, and the cracks were quickly pieced together using photoshop at a high resolution. This Comp acts as the base template to what will then happen with the rest of the shot. Everything will work from this black and white template. Further down the line, 

the light areas will be picked up to create an embossed image within the final composition, similar to how a displacement map works within Maya. 

In a new composition, using the shatter tool and using a 3D light to illuminate a point of prominence within the frame, I used the shatter tool to create the impression of a shattering concrete wall moving from left to right to act as the reveal for the title. 

The next part was working to get the reveal of the title assets to move in sync with the shattering debris. Which was done on the time slider, by just aligning the animation points in the same spaces. 

To achieve a result like this. (Above) 

Later, a blue overtone is added in a new composition which will affect the overall colour palette of the final composition. In this instance, we desired to have a blue colour that would help further represent the palette of the lighting in the film. 

And finally in a new composition a layer of floating particles was added just as a finished effect to the pieces, creating the impression of dust specs flourishing across the final frame. With the black BG in tow, this will be easy to composite as there is no underlying layer perturbing the dust layer. 

With all of the compositions combined, linking and working in conjunction with one another, the finished result looks a little bit like this.