Two Of A Kind
Week I
For the third project, my group: Brook Eilers, Youran Lu, and Candice Woon, aim to create a mock car commercial that aims to capture timelessness and beauty between two different bugs.
The Concept:
Our story begins with a small Ladybug who crawls into a shallow shot, blurring the background. Ominously, the ground begins to rumble under the ladybug as a car approaches into view. The lady but begins to lift off and rise as the car drives next to the bug in the shot, coming into focus and bringing attention to the front of the car. As the lady lifts off the frame, the second shot clips in where the car comes into frame and continues down the road, trailing plumes of light dust under the tires. As the car goes down the road, the lady bug comes into frame to fly into the dust after the car. The idea of the duo is a take on "two of a kind" as the car is a Volkswagon Beetle and a Ladybug.
Below is a quick concept storyboard by Youran Lu.
Shot one will be a stable shot while shot two will be a near 180 pan.
Previs of the car shots created by Youran Lu.
Week II
The focus of this week was to prepare a previs and presentation to pitch our idea to the mentors. This was also the week that we as a team did our first shoot. Our location was Wormsloe Plantation where we used the drive that is dressed with beautiful tree shadows and atmospheric perspective. HDRs were taken with a Theata S and automated with several different exposures.
Our critique given was to scarp the 180 pan as it will be a pain to track with all the trees. They thought our shots were pretty but needed to be live action which I agree with. We decided to reshoot for this project and created a shot where the pan was very slight and gave a tiny bit of movement to the shot.
We finally got our car model! Purchased here, our model is a 1949 Beetle which will for show give us that vintage vibe with our shots. Below is a shaded car model and material attributes.
Week III
I decided that the car shaders were way to vibrant for the scene. Professor Bridget Gaynor addressed that I could sample the most saturated pixel I could fine on my background plate and just change the hue, keeping the saturation values the same. With that method, I produced improved car shader colors.
I also revisited the reflection on my tires, car pain, and window shaders as the fresnel was too strong. I jumped the values down to around .02-.05 for these shaders.
Below is a turntable of the altered shaded car as well as well as the attributes of each shader. I plan on going in to paint imperfections on the tires and metals, yet I will have to UV the car parts since they are not yet UVed.
The car shaders now match the color scheme of the footage, and the windows are darkened so you cannot see into the car as easily.
I also chose to revisit the setting on my sky dome so that the fill would not be as strong. I noticed this was an issue in my first turntable that blew out the shaders. Below are the attributes of both the key light and the skydome.
The camera match for the pan had to be reworked as well. The old camera match was too 'wiggly' because the camera was tracked with the edge of shadows as trackers. Candice Woon helped me in tracking the camera correctly by selecting out areas of shadow that would not change or move like that of the trunk.
Camera Tracking (First Attempt)
Camera Tracking (Second Attempt)
I decided that the first attempt was a little closer to how the actual camera track should be. Manually, I went in to the Animation Graph Editor and removed the key frames after the camera stops panning. I then went through and edited some of the keys to match the gradual pan more thoroughly.
Below is the pan that I was able to get out of editing the Nuke tracking. I also oriented the road to the X axis as well so that Candice will have an easier time completing calculations on the FX.