Week 3 - Independence day 2: the sequel

During this week I decided to dedicate all my time to finishing up the preproduction and get done with the storyboards and concept art. I was struggling to create a reasonable story as to how the alien creature crashed onto earth, I wanted to have it crash through the ceiling but my instructor advised me not to go with that, as it would require me to roto the roof and show the upper level. I chose to change the story a little, instead of the creature crashing through the ceiling, it will have crashed on the upper level, and crawled to the bottom level, this would give a nice build up and have the main character follow the trails left behind by the creature. The storyboard was just about finalized by Thursday, all I needed to do is make the mock shoot and finalize the creature concept art.

i have used a number of references to get the concept arts of this character, a majority of them are of the artist Peter Mohrbacher, he creates ethereal angels and creatures that were perfect for the theme i was going for.

he has many creatures that have objects for heads and were very alien-like, so i decided to take this design and mash it with another alien design to get the desired design..

i wanted to go with something more organic and less robotic.

During this week we learned how to motion track, which is something I’ve been wanting to learn for a while! In class, we were taught how to do 2D motion tracking, which is done by finding a well contrasting spot on the area we want to track and placing a tracking point on it. The tracking point would then analyse the spot and would follow it’s motion. When we create the production, we will place physical trackers to help define the area better. We had an exercise where we had to roto our faces out and insert something underneath it, the example we were shown was of a guy’s face detaching and revealing a cyborg. Our lecturer asked us to film a video of our selves so we could do the same, I ended up placing a cartoon character underneath my face just for laughs. The way this would be used in my movie is to have the character move with the camera perfectly, there would be much movement, but it’s just enough. I will mostly be using rotoscoping to mask out the main character when the alien comes close to him. Me and Paulo went to the place I wanted to film the movie in and got the mock done, I then just jammed them into aftereffects, placed the CGs on it and worked the intro and outro.