The Revenant

So date night this week was spent at the cinema - watching The Revenant...
There was one particular shot that was incredible - starting with the lead character on the ground, moving through a forest and then jumping onto a horse...the camera tracked alongside the whole way - including galloping across a field

I think the horse was an articulated - one shot showed a close up of the horse, as Leonardo DiCaprio put a saddle on it. There was fighting and yelling everywhere - the horse didn't move a hair or even twitch...

Amazing cinematography - glad we got to see it on the big screen

Image Based Lighting

Image Based Lighting tutorial

"Image-based lighting (IBL) is the process of illuminating scenes and objects (real or synthetic) with images of light from the real world" Paul Debevec, USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Today we refreshed our memories, about how to light a scene in Maya. First off, we used IBL lighting. Here's a sphere with an .hdr (high bit depth image) that contains colour and brightness information across a very wide dynamic range.

We'll be using lighting techniques in our Going Live Jeremy Kyle toys animation - so today we used the room created by Sang and set up IBL, point lights, area lights and directional lights.

IBL lighting and room set

IBL lighting sphere

Lighting build ups - starting with shadow lighting. The green tinge is taken from the grass, which is 'outside' on an image back plate.

Build up using point light

Adjusting levels

Without the green shadows 

Introducing area light outside the window 

and a directional light for the sun

Red outline shows which selection of the image I want to render

Wire frame model, when using an IBR render view setting

Bounce ball!

Bounce ball in 2D

So here's my quick test trial in photoshop that I created last year. This is literally a red elipse in Photoshop, animated through a series of key frames. I drew the bounce path on a separate layer and once finished, turned that layer off and exported it as a gif file.

And here's my bouncing ball created in 3D in Maya! 

 We used the graph editor to smooth out the path of the bounce - when I could 'see' the arches that the Y axis coordinates created, I realised that it was the computer equivalent of  the hand drawn bounce path that I created last year in photoshop layer that I'd turned off.  Wow! The graph editor suddenly made sense.....until... that is.... it came to adjusting the graph for timing!! That made no sense! Practice, practice, practice!

Graph editor showing the Y axis (green) bounce path

Concept art for Jeremy Kyle - Toys pitch

Concept artwork for Jeremy Kyle - toys pitch.....

IC-98 Dundee Contemporary Arts - Drawn into tomorrow

This was quite something. 

Earlier today I stood in a dark gallery space and became mesmerised by these very detailed and slow moving digital art pieces. I particularly love the huge scale of these images. The tempo of the animation is incredibly slow and the movement of flags, waves, leaves, fireflies are accurately observed....

The projected images were so large (almost cinema screen size) I could almost believe that I was stood  inside the scene....fascinating to be stood in a monochrome landscape!

The image with the colonnade and the white awnings reminded me of a part of Edinburgh at the end of Princes street....particularly during the festival...

Film: Contact (1997)

A clip that caught my attention this week....

Film: Contact (1997)
Director: Robert Zemeckis

Love the twist at the end.
How?!!
Did they film it in reverse? Was it two actresses?
Still can't figure this out at all!

Continuing reflective practice

Reflecting on Practice...

Enjoyed the exercise yesterday...
We worked in pairs and the objective was to tell the other person about our research project....they then presented our research summary and ideas to the group.

Good lesson in communication!
I omitted to ask or mention my methodology (despite having it written in an abstract!!) so another good reminder of providing ALL the information succinctly.

I was asked a direct question about my final project during this communication and reflective exercise.

Why ice?

Interesting that this process forces me to bring my unconscious influences and ideas to the conscious awareness....

Why ice?
It's a great physical metaphor to represent the emotional journey of the project - a solid frozen state, which can melt and transform into something that brings growth and opportunity...