thesis: closing in
It's getting close to due date, things are moving along, not as well as I hoped but good enough for what it is now. I was hoping to make the soft deadline of April 10th, it's still possible but following the better judgment of personal wellbeing, I decided that I'm not going to kill myself trying to meet the soft deadline, plus I'd like to give a few scenes a bit more time to tweak.
On the note of tweaking, I was going over my storyboards from previs and really there were quite a few scenes that are quite different now in production form. Most of the changes spawn from technical problems, but also there are aesthetics issues that arisen in the translation process from storyboard to CG. A lot of the framing I had just didn't work out as well once in CG form. I tend to frame wide, whether in my photographs or in my design work. This is something I've mostly picked up from photojournalism and landscape photography. The need to provide context to the subject, the environmental elements are a big part of a visual presentation.
Wide in the context of a cinematic narrative, of course doesn't work as well... ok it does, just not in my case. The issue in this piece comes from the fact that the subject is the environment, not only was the wide framing making the scenes very objective and lacking focus. It also created a major problem with rendering time and on a more logistical level, created a massive extra set of buildings to model and texture. The wider shots also means there are large distance the camera has to travel, which created difficulties in making motion feel natural in such a massive scene.
Maybe it's a little odd that I am talking about camera motion that feels natural, because I'm trying to stay with camera moves that's physically possible to achieve with a real camera and a good camera rig. And really there's nothing natural about that. Maybe more appropriate would be to say I'm looking for a more traditional cinematic style. Sure it'd be fun to do one of those massive Lord of the Rings fly overs or a Fight Club style building fly-through, but these moves are starting to feel like something you drop into a movie because you can. (Yes yes, it's also very hard to do right and I can't pull it off... please let me finish executing my well formed excuse masquerading as an artistic decision.)
The change to a tighter framing is a departure from what I usually do stylistically but I feel that in this case, it worked out for the better. The tighter framing created more tension in the scenes and also made it easier to direct the viewer to specific subjects via variation in brightness and converging lines.
