Showreel session

The future plan started from now.The first thing I need to do is collect all of my works and pick one or two projects to make my showreel.

Here are two links I ve got from my supervisor ,they are good for matte painters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhleQ42IL1E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U6fJdILDaQ

Ideas so far are:
1.Get Ikaros projects concept art works and clean the layers one by one for the benefits of breakdowns making.

2.Make some 3D cards movements to avoid people from getting bored.

3.Develop some new works and practise the skills as well

4.Always put the background music "back".

Final shot!

For the final shot, we were really feeling nervious and stressful, we all consume that our final shot could only be better than the other ones .For me, it's a really big scene, we combined almost all of the good 3D elements in it,and give it a fish lens shot in the last frame.

I was totally confused and didn't know what kind of colours could suit our last one, it's a big chalenge for me to make an entire nighttime city with so many different lights, I need to use as least 5 colours of lights but not mess them up.

I searched for some awesome art works of the whole city stuff:

1.From the first one, I learned how to use the light beams to lighting up the whole city.
2. for the second one, i learned how to create the space using huge amount of 3D elements and also I took the reference of the fog and cloud.
3.The third one influenced me of the small lights on the buidings .


To let the final shot's colours as colourful as the shots before .I took a snapshot from the pacific rim's trailer as my rough colour plate:

 The final shot completed:

For the compositon of this shot, I prefer to use the triangle one to  make the scene more stable.Also point at the character.

I used 4 lights to ponit at the character to emphasise him :

Make people find the focus clearly and quickly is also one of the main purpose of this scene, this shot will only take less than a second time in our final film, so what I need to do is make it as impressive as I can and also make several hints for people to find out. Although the final frame is showing people the whole city not the character, but make sure the character is still one of the main part of this shot is still important.

Main methods I used in This scene is warm colours for the center part , dark and cold colours for the corner and front element but still keep te details.

For the final comp stage, my contribution is supervised the comp team to finishe= this most complex scene to reach the result as similar as my concept.

This is the final comp,We built the 3D basic boxes shapes of the city and exported them into nuke, Lighted them in Nuke and also created many colour pieces to paste on the buildings , use the softlight layer and overlay layers to apply the colours.


I also made the grond texture for the final shot used the texture below (I made in photoshop) as well:

Here's the final comp of the final shot:

SHOT010 design

Shot 10 is one of my favourite shots in the project.The placement of the 3D elements is already good enough which gives me more space to create the atomosphere.

Here is the 3D placement of shot 10 by Michael :

The completed one:

As the same rules of the shot008,I made the liveaction part darker and reduced the saturation.To push things back, it's very neccesary to use the low transparency colours to cover the small elements around the main building.

Shot007_completed and issues

This is one of the narrow sky shots I need to get it done. It's a challenge that to create the depth in such a narrow space, the most simple way we were thinking was just fill it with a sky matte painting, but we declined that because :first of all, all of our shots happening in the nighttime, although we can fill up with the night time sky, but there won't be enough details to support this scene.Secondly, if we use the sky, then the lights we are going to add on the walls will not be strong enough to effect the skys and give it uniform colours.The last thing is, sky is not a good enough element for the sci fi work.

Fortunately, I found a really good reference game called "Remember me", there'a scene that happens in the similar scene as we shot:

I took the reference of my lighting in the concept art:

These are the original 3D elements layer and plate:

For this scene, the feeling I want to catch is dangerous and mysterious, we would defocus the background to let people can't see what's over there exatcly,but still need a lot of details to keep the quality.

The final version completed:

I created the left and right sides' matte paintings to help lighting up the whole
scene.  and created the high contrast of the colours.
Red could be the represent of dangerous, so I added the long red light as the main light for it.

SHOT002_completed

Shot 002 is the one of the moving shots in our film which has a lot of camera movement and perspective,I need to create both sides of the scene and also notice that the size of the art is big enough and high resolution that the comp team could use immediately.

The colour reference I took from the two amazing art works below:

The first one is the represent of the warm colour work in the night time, the below one is in the cold tone ,I wanted to created the colours between warm and cold but doesn't messed up.

The orignal 3D elements layers:

The final left side:

The composition test:

Firstly, I earased the round building in the middle to leave a breath place for the character .I used the warm colour to make the buildings near the focus come front ,I did some matte painting lights for the nearer buildings with red and yellow. For pushing the other elements back forward and make the depth, i used the blue and cyan-blue and also reduced their transparency,to let people feel they are far away and coverd by some air and fog. The area of the brightest light is for the character to fly by.


The right side of shot002:

 i used some high resolution photo materials and painted over them to make the foggy atomosphere, I don't think make the both sides balance and fill up with the same buildings could be a good choice, so i chose to make this side more mysterious feeling, because our character is flying from the left to right, it's a good feeling that he fly into a world that we can barely see the details to make the audience feel curious and not to feel bored.

Shot008 _completed

Shot008 is a shot we shoot in an alley, this is the original plate cleaned below:

 We can only see a narrow sky in this scene, we want more scifi feeling. To get the result, I deleted the right part of the walls,Michael added some 3D scifi buidings in it. Here are the layers of the 3D elements:

This is the completed version of the pure 3D shot008:

 It already has the feeling of depth,but if we see through it, there are some perspective issues that coudn't be ignored.The most obvious one is the white elevator in the right side , I did some perspective lines to help us to find the problems.

The vanishing Point of  the elevator is totally different from the buidings' which will make the scene never looks right. And the Burj Dubai in the left bottom increased the burden of the whole scene again, it's unnecessary and destroyed the depth.

The matte painting version of shot008:

 As we can see , i corrected the perspective issues which appeared before, also added different lights to make the style uniformed，I gave a spot light in photoshop to highlight the depth also covered some details in the corners to emphasise the character.

I havn't modofied the colours a lot of the walls in the concept art stage, I guided the comp team modified the colours and added several warm lights out of the windows in the comp stage.

Here is the final comp result, the matte painting I created has been used directly in the final movie .

This shot is for the second part that people could recognise that the character is falling down, so or the depressive and sad feeling we discussed to make the scene darker and bluer.

SHOT001_completed

The original tunnel plate for shot001:

For this shot , I contributed the idea of making different kind of lights in the tunnel to decorate and also illuminate it.
The work I need to do in this stage is fill up the little square space with matte painting background.


The first early time matte painting for this shot:

 

Unfortunately, this painting is in the daylight before I decided to make the whole movie in the night, so it doesn't match our project well, but it was a good practise of the making of buildings in matte painting also a valuable space and colour control parctise.

 

The layers I got from team member Michael:

The final version :

I corrected the colours into red and blue ,also used the red light to highlight the scend,make it looks more myserious.

The final comp result: