The teammates and I were thinking about the feel of the film AGAIN.




There's a mutual inclination towards a painterly feel  like in this Brave concept.
Additionally how could we not spy a little inspiration from this?

We did venture further in our discussion to have some really powerful and unusual textures. Something that still provides the film with a cultural and naturalistic feel, but with something a little more unique and edgy. Maybe something as unusual but a little more subtle than these or perhaps a combination of these styles with a subtle painterly feel? 

Monster Vision continued

Vision tests for Ellie's Monster:

Since Ellie's Monster has six heads, the screen was split into the vision of of those six heads. I wanted to do test it in a really stylized exaggerated way. So I created the basic division layer and used a series of masks to keep each layer within its section and simply keyed movement in the layers.

Nikki said she felt come blinks were needed again to highlight that the audience are seeing this through the monster's eyes.

I did a simple fade to black kind of thing really quickly but ..it just didn't look clear enough...

Monster Vision

For the animatic, Nikki asked me to have a wee look at the monster vision ideas. Sam's Monster's vision was actually proving to be a VERY difficult task to pull off.



As Sam's monster is mainly rocky textures I tried to have some dusty textures around his eyes to explain to the audience that it is Sam's Monster's vision. However I felt it was too distracting and boring.




In this test, as Sam's Monsters eyes have an orange glow, I thought I'd add the orangy/yellow tint to the vision. I also gave the vision a watery movement to try to bring some life to the scene. But it just didn't really seem to work.

Of course these are only the first two tests. More practice and research are undoubtedly needed for this section if we continue with it in the film.

So after my return from the black abyss that is maya, I am back where i belong. A little place called After Effects. The most predominant weather effect in the film has got to be the storm. I decided to mock up a few rough tests to get us going:

I added in the ocean to help create the feel of the scene and kept the clouds light to allow the splattered paint texture in the sky to shine through however the light clouds did not create dark stormy feel required.

more water inspirations

More works to add to the ever-growing list of water inspirations :)

A Fantasia concept by Rob Kaz

                                                        A Lilo and Stitch concept by James Coleman

                                                                  A water environment Rodel Gonzales

A Fantasia concept by James Coleman

So I decided to go back into maya and try again. This time I tried changing the material connected to the ocean itself with a random texture I found online.

This gave the water a more interesting paint-like texture.

A collection of ocean fails:

Combining PS and AE filters, i tried to create a simple painterly feel to the terrible 3D ocean I created....It didn't work.

A little research...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml297IBrtwg

Just a little Gobelins inspiration. The idea for how the world looks beneath the water definitely allows me to see this scene in a new light. The texture of the water surface and the sky when he jumps out of the water also inspires a little more consideration in regards to texture of our film.

the underwater scene also reminds me of gobelins 'apre la pluie'.

http://vimeo.com/2336458

Again, in this the water leads to another world. However, it's this scene in particular ^

with the light shimmering down from the surface which appeals to me more. Also this shot, also reminds me greatly of the scene in our movie when Murdo's thrown from the boat into the water.

Ocean tests

After messing around a little with Maya's create ocean tool, I rendered out a section.No lighting or anything just plain old ocean. Although changing the given material of the ocean to a more painterly style, the texture did not seem to change very much.




Took these into Photoshop and tried numerous attempts to add a painterly feel to them, importing them in as a sequence and applying set actions to save going into each frame individually.
Basic colour tweaks and a few stylize effects were added to try to further emphasise a painterly feel but the effect still seemed weak.





Numerous attempts to add life but also a painterly feel to the scene using Photoshop in the above example lead to complications. The foam layer on top was too random and in a sequence the movement was too quick and erratic.