Week 2 - Independence day 1

So, this week has been a roller coaster of events, the biggest one of them all being that I split up from my team. My instructor saw it best that I split as I’ve been having constant conflict with the two, they wanted to create something simple and childish, I wasn’t going for that, so I simply agreed to work on my own. The two didn’t put any effort into what they did, one of them claiming she couldn’t draw when I asked her with help with the story-boarding, and the other insisting on creating fidget spinner weapons. I had an idea to carry out almost instantly after I split, the idea being of a soldier hunting down a god-like entity. The creature would be elegant yet deadly with an ethereal feel to it, it was inspire by an artist I adore and respect called Peter Mohrbacher, his work talks of angels that guard the skies and galactic entities resembling deities, so I thought his work was the perfect reference material. I pitched it to my instructor, and he thought the idea was good enough, he asked me to refine some features and think of somewhere we could film it, and I started working on that. The second day of the breakup with great, I didn’t have to work on something I wasn’t completely uninterested in and I had the chance to create something great, so I got to work. I thought of several places to set the scene, two of them were an alleyway (which was really overdone, so I decided to come up with some place else) and an indoor parking lot, I wanted to have a nice bright setting where the viewer is uncomfortable, I used the movie Annihilation 2018 for this setting, the majority of the movie is set in the day time, yet the happenings around the area are very eerie and spooky.

The lessons we learned this week involved rotoscoping and the three different kinds, including each of their advantages and disadvantages. The techniques we learned were the manual, semi-automated and fully automated techniques, they are self-explanatory, the manual one requires us to highlight the areas we want to roto by hand. The semi-auto one is one of the least ones I think I will be using, but it requires us to paint the area in question, which is more painful than pulling teeth. The fully automated one was the one I think I will be overusing, you need only to make the first shape and it generates the rest for you (with tweaks of course). The information we learned that day would come in handy when we need to use a prop or supports in the scene, as well as removing unnecessary things in the back of the shots. This also helps us with green screening, which will be used in the future hopefully. The exercise we did in class was of a girl looking at the screen, we had to replace her eye and change it up, we recoloured it as well to make her look like she had pink eye.

Currently I am working on refining the storyboards and designing the creature that I want to model, so far so decent.