Rubys initial research

INITIAL IDEAS AND REFERENCE MATERIALS ON THE THEMES AND TECHNIQUES I COULD USE:

Premetheus VFX breakdown

Watching this video reminded me of all the work I have produced across the colleges I have been to and how I have never really utilised all the facilities accessible to me. I.e I have never built part of a set for use in the green screen room I have never used landscapes and environments around me in combination with cg. I have only used the green screen room to record movement for use on cg characters some of which not built by myself. This is prompting me to try and use environments around me and materials around me to create something photo real. Whether it be layering up an existing environment or adding cg elements to a person or object I want to use natural materials like shown in the video with the fish bones and oil for the engineer’s D+a.

I realised I have done the opposite on a couple of graphics projects a few years ago in which I took natural things and made them look different. In the images below I scanned real fruit pieces and used Photoshop to edit them, I did this for a college project and wanted to get a lot of texture in the images.

Another project was to create an advertisement for car sharing in the local area for this I used photographs of a couple of class mates to paint over and create cartoon versions of them for the advertisement.

So when I watched the video about premetheus it just made me realise I could do the opposite of what I would normally do. So take natural materials and use them to look like something else or use people and actors in a green screen room and change the environments or their personal features with programs like Nuke.

Examples of photorealism in pictures and art.

This is an oil painting by Doug Bloodworth.

examples of photorealism

This is a photo realism portrait by Rob Heferan done with oil paints and acrylics.

photo realistic drawings

This believe it or not is a picture created with coloured pencils by an extremely skilled artist called Aldolfo Fernandez Rodreguez. Its possibly one of the best examples of photo realism I could find.

http://www.awn.com/news/mpc-creates-photoreal-vfx-monuments-men

This particular page on AWN website looks at MPC’s work on the monuments men production and explains a bit about certain effects and how they were done. I found it helpful when trying to visualize the processes involved as a photo real scene is quite difficult to distinguish what had been in the frame originally and what had been changed. As its supposed to be believable to and audience and it wasn’t obvious effects like that of Prometheus. That was done in a Sci – fi scenario where everything is essentially a fabrication where as the monuments men is set in a war and around existing environments so its very hard as a viewer to tell what is VFX.

One of the effects was to have footage of a army camp across the beach in east Sussex it was filmed with around a 100 tents and various actors on set then MPC worked and modelled for four months to make that scene ten times bigger. so they modelled tents, people and vehicles amongst other things to get the right scale.

This is something I have also never tried, taking outdoor footage and creating buildings or extra landscape or people for it. I have also never used or staged a set whether its small or not I never used actors in costume and changed the footage. Which is definitely something I want to incorporate into the project over the next year.

http://effectscorner.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/photo-real-and-realism-in-visual.html#.U-DW8LlwbIU

The article on the monuments men and the website above made me see how much planning goes into these kind of shots. The director will use photographers and their team to go out and get as much reference work as possible so, this can be for visual reference so the size, scale, shape, texture of a building or landscape. Or for different weather forecasts to get a sense of how it will look at certain times of the day and as much as possible for light to see how and where light will hit an object or landscape. Essentially there is just a huge library to refer to when you are trying to visualize your final piece of work and recreate it. This is something I plan to do when creating our group project because I can see how useful it would be especially given the themes for our project are sun, nature and beauty.

RESEARCH INTO THEMES:

*POWER STRUGGLE IN THE WORLD AROUND US (TECHNOLGY VS NATURE)

I am heavily influenced by people around me so people I used to work with had very strong opinions about the current situation in Gaza so I looked into it to get a gauge of what was happening and why. I found obviously several striking images and videos but one stuck out to me in particular. I thought I could be linked to technology vs nature as I had previously read about stunning views on the Gaza strip and the I thought about the views now as they would now be destroyed and rippled with horrific scenes. The clip also shows the power difference in the Israeli people over the Palestinian people as it follows the journey of three Israeli soldiers and their realisation of what they had done after they returned home. One of them was greeted with a brand new Tv and decorated room which made him see what he had left behind.

* LIGHT REPRESENTING HOPE DARKNESS REPRESENTING FEAR (LIGHT , SUN, NATURE)

Picture of a worker emerging from one of Gaza

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/12/gaza-tunnels/verini-text

I continued to look into the Gaza situation I came across the article above with the striking image of the guy running through the Gaza tunnels and read through the article which followed two young lads that worked in the tunnels and monitored what went through them. It explained how one of the brothers died instantly upon part of the tunnel collapsing. The combination of that story and this image made me think about light and how to some people it represents hope and that Theres a clear way out of the tunnel. Its when the light disappears the hope fades. I thought maybe I could generate an idea from that.

*MOTHER NATURE

I began first looking at mother nature and the idea of mother nature.

I found that the term is a personification of the earth and everything living on earth. I also found in Greek mythology mother nature was the first Greek goddess known as Gaia mother of the earth. There is a mythological story that when Persephone the great granddaughter of Gaia was abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld and whilst she was there she ate pomegranate seeds, the food of the dead. So each year she had to return to the underworld for part of the year. This caused her mother Rhea to be grief stricken and reflect this in the winter weather for this period of time.

This story made me think what if there was someone on earth like mother nature in the present day, but instead of reflected her feelings with the weather. Actually reacting to the changes in the weather and her land due to human inhabitents and global warming. So these effects being shown on her body. So maybe a forest gets cut down her fingers turn to stubs or the weather turns grey she becomes discoloured or even plants start to wilt her hair start to look grey and dry.

this was an idea I really liked for photo realism because it would be something we could use an actress for and use nuke and the green screen room in a way that I wanted. Instead of just creating a CG character and using the same techniques as usual. It would be a great way to really learn the software.

The kind of look I would be trying to mimic is like that seen in the tv series Once upon a time. This video takes you through briefly some of the techniques used to get the VFX in the series. This is the same way I want to produce my work and the same style I would like mine to be very photo real and believable.

I began to think more in depth about the story for this piece, I thought it would be good if we showed the young woman in her home surrounded by forest, trees and great landscape. Have her looking really beautiful and content and then have the affects of the current state in the world such as war or damage and global warming show on her body and face. Only when her home gets destroyed slowly by other people taking over her forest to build some kind of complex on it. So have a gradual effect of them moving closer to her home and taking away the protection from flourishing nature and the real world.

* PLANTS AND NATURE

I began thinking about plants and nature for more inspiration of themes or new stories and following a conversation with a group of friends began looking into science.

I came across an experiment I had heard of in which a female scientists by the name of Dorothey Rettalleck used music to change the growth of plants.

http://m-edition.com/archives/19

In the link you’ll read that she played rock music which caused the plants to turn away from the speakers and wither. She kept them in silence and they grew as normal and she also played Mozart which caused them to grow 2inches taller and face the speaker.

This lead me to ask if plants have feelings. Which may sound ridiculous but we refer to them as living and when they stop growing and turn brown we refer to them as dead and if they respond to music surely its in some way a choice.

Dead Alive

I wasn’t thinking of living talking plants clearly just maybe representing plants as living with some sort of feelings. Ive heard in certain religions they believe that when you die not only will you be asked about your choices in life but plants and buildings and even the ground will talk about you and your choices as observers. I think this is true within Islamic beliefs although I am unsure. I thought if I couldn’t come up with an idea using something like this I could maybe use it within the mother nature idea. So have plants sort of turning away from loud eerie noises or maybe facing towards the woman’s house.

*FORCES OF NATURE

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980127c.html

There are four fundamental forces of nature which are gravity, electromagnetic, the strong force and the weak force. These are natural forces that hold materials together and affect the structure of the world. This was just a way to try and understand how the world around us is formed and what forces are at work to keep it that way. Maybe as a way of characterizing these forces so gravity as a strong character grounding everything. Maybe the head of a big company with most of the power making everyone around them focus on what they want. Electromagnetic energy pulls everything towards it. So maybe a male character that’s has a kind of power of women which he could use to get more power. So could be a villain in the piece. With this i began trying to characterise the forces of nature so maybe the strong force a female character with the power to affect peoples decisions. However the rough idea reminded me of fantastic four although obviously its a different plot with different characteristics. I can see similarities in the characterisations I was trying to create. Such as the manipulative power crazy victor von doom and the character that would be representing electromagnetic energy.

*ELEMENTS OF NATURE

I went on to look at elements of nature the obvious

fire

earth

water

wind

These elements made me remember a TV series I used to watch called Avatar the last air bender. In which there were four tribes of people which all had a different element that they could control in a world which both humans and spirits inhabited. This made me want to stay away from these elements slightly as I didn’t want to end up doing the same thing twice. Although I did keep it in my mind encase any inspiration came from it.

Then I looked at the periodic table of elements and what was natural and what was man made by natural products. This just made me think of all the materials we see in every day life and how they al ultimately come from nature.

I began thinking of how we need certain animals or creatures to produce these materials. Although obviously not on the periodic table materials like wool and silk or food like honey completely left too nature. This made me think of what the world would be without these animals and creatures and maybe what we would have left to use to produce clothes and food.

Although this is an idea that would need a lot of working into just to get a decent story as opposed to a good story which needs work technically to produce.

I was thinking about what makes the tide pull and how so looked into the moons gravity and its affects. I began thinking about despicable me when gru steals the moon I was trying to get a vague understanding of what would happen if we had no moon.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100710232454AALFAaM

Maybe to create something to show vfx of certain effects. I found that without the moon certain affects would possibly be changes to our seasons and there would be no affect on our tide and it would be a lot colder. There would obviously be several more serious affects but I was just trying to get a rough story idea.

* SONG Lyrics

Jhene Aiko, stay ready

“if everything was dipped in gold, then it would never grow”

This I perceived to mean that everybody is too materialistic and some times forget that the world is a certain way for a reason we need things to survive, so not everything can be pretty and encrusted in diamonds. This was just some thing I could try to generate a story out of whether literally or not.

*GENRES OF FILM AND TV

With this I was simply looking at genres and trying to decide what our project could be.

Comedy

Drama

Sci Fi

Fiction

Fact

Romantic Comedy

Thriller

Horror

Action

Slasher

I think we decided to make ours a ficton drama piece of work. With this I began thinking what would represent this as in some cases people have got things wrong.

Such as a film called DR strange love that was produced by Stanley Kubrick that was meant to be a really serious film about the war and it ended up being a spoof about it because the team couldn’t pull it off.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bce_1315526687

I thought if we decided what we want our piece to be then we could look into how to produce it in that way.

I also began to think of how you sell something that doesn’t exist. So if we were to present our idea to a real company how do we make them buy into our idea. I thought about how they would want to part with their money or time and realised it was about feeling something for the characters in your story.

I looked at how comic relief make their money they don’t just simply say there’s people starving and dying in poorer countries. They don’t just follow a story of someone who is living in struggle.

They use celebrities and put them in the position with the people in struggle show their own reaction to it and their emotion. This gives realisation to the audience and you stop and think this is a celebrity from a completely different life and shadowing this person has reduced them to tears.

They also use a very good technique of jumping from one extreme to the next with comedy and performances that are perfectly normal. Then jumping back to another part of the story so it has more impact on the audience.