D E S I G N VISUALISATIONS JEREMY BONWICK MODULE 04 THE PORTFOLIO
2 MODULE 01 The wind blows. The roof creaks. The wine warms. With a crash the glass crashes in, the curtains billow, the table cloth stirs. Was that a hand? The wine spills, its blood red contents seeps into the cotton. Red stains mixed with the rain. And now, the knife is slammed into the table. It twitches as it comes to rest, moonlight glinting off its blade. The onion is halved.
MODULE 01
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MODELING The modeling process for M01 involved taking reference dimensions and photos to 3d model a selection of objects ranging from fruit to household objects. A range of
modifiers were used in Max to achieve this including simple edit-poly and lathe. The textures were created from reference photos as well and mapped onto the modeled objects via UVW maps. Photoshop was used to create not only diffuse maps but also bump and reflection
maps to add realism to the modeled objects. The onion in the scene represents the culmination of these skills with a displacement modifier used to create the inside of the cut. The knife which sits in the centre of the frame and accurately glints in the light and around its sharpened edges.
MODULE 01
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The cinematic nature of the scene was complemented by the mincing of anamorphic lenses by creating oval bokeh and slight distortions at the edges of the frame as with a wider field of view. The whole image is at a 2.35:1 aspect ratio as is common with cinemascope lenses.
MODULE 02
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MODULE 02 ‘Chiarosuro’ noun. origin; Italian. 1_ the distribution of light and shade in a picture. 2_ the use of deep variations in and subtle gradations of light and shade, especially to enhance the delineation of character and for general dramatic effect:
8 THE PEOPLE
THE SETTING
THE SCENE
K (female, 70) and R (male, 68). K studied dentistry at university in the 70s, practiced for 10 years and gave it up to have children. Tried working part-time to begin with but couldn’t balance the working life with caring for children, she felt like she was missing out on the special times. Since then K has rediscovered her love of drawing and painting. She now spends her afternoons on botanical watercolors. R met K at university, he studied Arts and took a masters in journalism. He worked as a sports correspondent for 30 years. Watching cricket overseas during the Australian winter until retiring to write his great novel this year — enthusiasm is abound, but it is not as smooth a process for him. Things are not necessarily the writers paradise he imagined, walks in the morning for inspiration, late nights by the fire to write. No. Mostly it is blank pages and wasted ink.
The couple downsized 20 years ago — with working children most of their relics are gone from the house. But there’s photos, vacation, graduations, weddings even. The house has two bedrooms — one master and a spare. The large dining/ living space doubles as an artistic space. The pair have a decent sum of money, a pension and a super fund support them as well. They live in North Carlton in a 90s building which they have left relatively unaltered apart from some styling changes. The house has accumulated over the years — cheaper more common place objects from the 80s. The 90s is where they made their money, there is nicer pieces from this time. They relocated all their belongings when they downsized so everything is just slightly too big Some sporting memorabilia from R’s days as a correspondent, a framed print of the time his report made the front page. Bookcases filled with art books, tabbed and pages folded.
At the dining table paper and pens — R is writing. He’s just stood up, at a juncture, maybe writers block, there’s a few scrunched pages, a notebook open, a nice fountain pen and some cheaper ballpoints. The TV is on in the corner, muted, a replay of the 2001 Ashes. Opposite and across the room is a flurry of colour. Light streams in the window onto an easel; K has been painting. Her subject, a vase of tulips, catching the afternoon sunset’s rays. The painting is halfway through, the pencil sketch half-filled in by oil paints. R wishes he could be as productive. His wife is full of creativity, blossoming in her later years. He is stuck in the reflection, under the murky glaze of the TV’s glow not writing his great novel.
MODULE 02
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The key theme is the frustrations of the idealised novel writer. And the relationship between someone who has found their way to age gracefully and someone who is redefining their life as a new retiree.
The scene is played out in two half rooms, each with their own character. The camera stays somewhat impartial, with a flat, straight on, one-point perspective view cut by the door frame. There is a use of perpendicular, parallel and perspectival create a rigid framework which allows the viewer to start to notice differences and contrasts between the competing sides of the frames.
10 TWO HALVES The composition is set up to create a contrast between the two characters and set up their differing mind-sets. The symmetry of the framing both suggest to the viewer that the two sides are comparable. There is a slight imbalance
and distortion of space that alludes to the dissatisfaction of the husband’s side of the frame on the right. It is murky and blue in hue in contrast to the brightly lit, sunlight filled and vibrant side of the wife’s studio. The mirror in the frame also acts to confine the husband, closing in around him on the sides, boxing him in, alluding to his lack of creativity and discontent. It also sets up an idea that he is watching from across
the room, somewhat enviously as his wife works away with vigor at her easel. The heavy central wall is a barrier between them and also splits the scene into halves which heightened the symmetry of the composition.
MODULE 02
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CHANGES
The feedback on this module focused on the confusion of the spatial experience of the room, with the mirror not being obvious enough either to explain the other side of the room being reflected. To rectify this I moved the table up to bridge the gab between the two sides. The table on the left was also moved back into the room so that it appeared less cramped into the opening. The mirror was also moved up to show more of the wall below to better show it as a mirror.
MODULE 03 ‘Front’ Is there something hidden? Is there something lurking behind the facade? There is. Something isn’t quite right,everything appears normal until you stop, and tilt your head. Change your perspective, look behind, look upside down. And there it is. Hidden, but now visible. Behind normality. Out the back.
MODULE 03
13 THE FILM ‘Front’ tells the story of a policeman who investigates an unusually vacant looking house sandwiched in a mundane terraced street only to find a secrete Marijuana grow set-up in a locked room at the back. The film looks at ideas of normality and the hidden truths behind the facades of said normality — the literal ‘front’ that is put up to hide something murky. The animation seeks to foreground ideas of perspective and surveillance to support this concept as the idea of a front is all about perception, or altering perception to conceal something. The narrative is set in a typical drama style which creates a cinematic filmic structure which is supported by the camera moves, lighting set-ups and aspect ratio.
14 EXT. CARLTON STREET - DAY Sideways; Grass blows gently back and forth in a breeze. The sun is out, the spring is in full bloom. In the background a line of terrace houses typical of Carlton. One doesn’t look quite right. Centre frame, its fence is tatty, the window frames need painting, its gloomy bluestone is unrendered. The windows are somehow darker, hiding what lies behind them. SFX: A Car pulling up. It trundles into frame in ECU, a strange blue flashing accompanies it. CU: The same house, reflected at a 45 degree angle in the windscreen of the car. The blue flashing is stronger — it is a Police car. The faint static of a radio can be heard from the inside. SFX: the door opens. CUT TO: INT. THE FRONT HOUSE - DAY A fuzzy image on an old TV, a high angle looking down onto… the view of the street outside, the Police car is parked opposite, the flashing lights cease their rhythm as the door opens. There is an eerie silence. PAN: To a mirror hanging on the wall, reflected in it is the front door of the house down a narrow corridor. The hall is bare and unadorned, the wallpaper a relic of a forgotten era. Dust hovers in the light coming through the leadlight window. Outside a figure moves in front of the glass pane. The door swings open, it was unlatched… CONTINUOUS SHOT: SLOWLY TRACKING HANDHELD POV: Moving through the house noises, startling. Footsteps constant. SFX: A rising tone.
WHIP-PANs to where the sounds have emanated from; views into the house’s room; A living room, the TV left on with a VHS. The furniture is old, 50s and 60s pieces, the wallpaper is dark and overbearing. Family photos hang on the wall, there’s a walking stick propped next to the couch and a newspaper folded on the coffee table. The next room: A workshop and painting studio, more family photos. Piles of papers. And a vase of dead flowers. The staircase in the corridor stretches up into a skylit void, the light bliding. Finally at the back; a kitchen. And at the back of the kitchen, a door… It is closed and a set of three locks hold it shut. It is strangely out of place, the brickwork around is frayed and the plaster chipped like it has been knocked through with no care for the aesthetics. CUT TO: INT. THE GROW ROOM - DAY WIDE: Greenery obscures the foreground out of focus and lightly swaying, bathed in a sickly yellow light. In the background, a door, with internal bolts fastened shut. It heaves as a distant thud impacts with its timber. But it holds. SFX: Rising drone, punctuated by the hits on the door. Start to pull back, the plants move closer to focus. A table comes into the foreground, a blurred mess sits there. FOCUS PULLS: They’re plastic bags fill with… weed. HIGH ANGLE: the rows of plants. CRACK, and the door crumbles, splinters fly and natural light spills in.
MODULE 03
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16 SEQUENCING The film explores a spatial passage through the dwelling moving right to left. The majority of shots follow a subtle linear progression in each shot moving through the section of the building, describing the experience of the long-shoot terrace corridor through a single continuous shot which lingers in each room down the hallway (5).
established in the preceding shots (6-8). Through the film the section of the architecture becomes readable and in contrast to the frontality of the terrace facade, appropriately setting the idea of the ‘front’ apart form its interior.
The lighting also is high-key and natural outside whilst cutting, angular and shadowed on the inside. The confusing hallway is replaced by a flatness in the grow room punctuated by an unnerving, sickly yellow glow.
The grow room at the back reverses this language by looking back towards the front of the house setting it apart and flipping the screen direction which is
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MODULE 03
17 SURVEILLANCE sideways framing (1) and overhead, birdseye view (4). These obviously non-POV shots set up a jarring mix along with the direct surveillance footage shots. The intention is to make the audience question what they are seeing and who’s
eyes they are seeing it through, that when you look at things from a different angle they seem different, unusual or even unnatural. This supports the main concept of the ‘front’ or facade that connotes normality hiding a shadier interior.
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The main theme of the film is surveillance which is addressed through an examination of point-of-view. The film inhabits a number of perspectives — both omniscient and diegetic. The camera takes on the direct POV of the policeman whilst also being very unnatural in its
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18 THE CAMERA
command. The long walking shot also has a noise controller added to the camera itself in Max to create a heightened jitteryness given its nature as a point-of-view shot. The noise is added to the position, The camera has varied actions throughout heightened in the Z axis to mimic footthe film, from locked-off and static in the falls, as well as the rotation to create a roll grow room, to dynamic and moving. through the footage. Most shots have a subtle amount of shake added in After Effects through the ‘wiggle’ The curve editor was used extensively
to choreograph the long camera move to accurately time the movement in the interpolation of its curve.
MODULE 03
19 REALISM The noise out of Max was first denoised and then a layer of noise was bended in from a downloaded royalty free asset. The noise mimics film cameras, which is a running theme continued from M01
where the settings on the Max physical camera have been set to seem like a cinema camera with an anamorphic lens. This includes a slight distortion at the edges and the trademark oval bokeh and streaking flares. The footage of the flashing police-car lights was also edited with an overlay to create the elongated flares as well as flashes that only occupy parts of the frame to mimic the rolling shutter of
most digital film cameras which read the image down the sensor resulting in such horizontal artifacts. These considerations, whilst hopefully unnoticeable while watching help to embed the film in a cinematic tone as well as a realism of an actual digital film camera.
20 THE EDIT The film was cut in Final Cut Pro with visual effect added in Adobe After Effects. The major part of the VFX was the addition of live action elements onto the CG plates rendered from Max. The plates were shot
on a greenscreen to be easily keyed out. Two processes were used — a simple colour key and a more complex trackmatte process. The clip is made blackand-white with a green filter to creates a white on black image to become an alpha channel for use with a track matte on the clip below. The security footage was dirtied-up with the ‘Bad-TV’ filter in Final Cut Pro to add
scanlines, noise, some colour distortions and wave. For the security TV in the grow room the image was composited onto the screen from Max and blended with the lighting to flash slightly in the dark room.
MODULE 03
21 THE SOUND
There is a level of non-diegetic sound too — LFE rumbles and rising drones — to punctuate the main transitions in the scenes, mainly between the exterior, interior and grow room. The sound for the The sound sits to complement the visuals grow room also creates a very unsettling and build the realism of the sequence. The atmosphere with a subtle humming, wind sound builds from the direct action of the drone underlined with the thudding on the scene to supplementary atmosphere to fill door from the policeman. the audio pallet. The sound also starts to justify the cuts in
Sound editing in Soundtrack Pro with tracks taken from royalty free libraries. The tracks are organized into their functions — Foley, SFX, Atmospheres and Music each of which is assigned a sub-mix to be leveled at the end independently of one another.
the editing with the sound of the car door opening timing with the cut inside to the security TV and noises from the houses and in the distance motivating the whip pans looking into the rooms during the long shot — which also acts to further embed the point of view by the audience’s vision following the character’s perception of sound.
22 REFLECTION
Throughout the subject there has been a focus on learning and improving skills in digital representation, especially in rendering through 3Ds Max. The progression worked from learning modeling and texturing in the first task to more focus on composition, lighting and camera. The first two tasks presented an opportunity to explore techniques which could then culminated into the final task. The first task was an experimentation in a cinematic vision, taking on aspects of an anamorphic cinema lens. The image is dramatic and based in an immerse image. Module 02 takes a more subtle approach which builds its narrative through its composition and the objects populating it. There was something satisfying in both these techniques — in a brash, dramatic image and in a more subtle, tightly composed, ‘flatten’ image. The process of modeling in Max became quite enjoyable, to the point
that for the last model the facades of the terrace houses — which could have been downloaded or modeled in rhino — were done in Max. Module 03 presented the challenge of render times — something I was not expecting entering the subject. There was a certain frustration with the shear amount of time needed for rendering out 90 seconds was frustratingly mindless compared to the create tasks of actually editing the footage at the end. The process of editing was not new to me, but this task forced learning of some new skills, especially in keying real footage into CG plates rendered from Max. The renders from Max for M03 were quite grainy and not especially well textured in some places. But the pace of the footage when played back at 24fps hid a lot of the imperfections, as did the choice of low-key lighting and slight camera
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shake. The noise was initially a concern — especially coming from cutting with clean digital video camera footage — but soon it became an interesting materiality element. This combined to create a hybrid of styles — with an effort made to mimic the feel of cinematic anamorphic lenses – where it was a halfway point between realism and a heighten and controlled aesthetic inevitable from rendering footage. Overall the skills quired suit with my existing abilities and give a set of renders that will be beneficial in the potential employment — visual representation is a passion that hopefully can be utilised in early employment opportunities.
24 REFERENCES
3d_addict, ‘bic’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/459781 9il, ‘Door Hinge’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/1129194 Banism24, ‘Free High Stool 3D model’. Retrieved from https://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ ID/1336663 Binyan, Parsley and Picture frame files from lecture content, Retrieved September 9th 2019. Brimmer, ‘3D Fertilizer model’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-lawn-garden-fertilizersmodel-1279686 Deckorator4, ‘3D Bouquet of tulips model’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ ID/1270600 Dendrobyte, ‘Pencil and Drawing’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/866040 Designconnected, ‘Sonora’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/1185806 Designconnected, ‘3D Dana Chair’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/1180431 Digital Griffix Studios, ‘Pile of Clothes’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-model-pileclothes/1060378
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HomiDiFerru, ‘3D model Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/ Index.cfm/ID/1249781 LemingPT, ‘Designer Table’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/479724 Matz models, ‘Painter Tools’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/842385 Poliigon, ‘Wood Flooring Mahogany African Sanded 001’. Retrieved from www.poliigon.com/texture/woodflooring-mahogany-african-sanded-001 Rainbowvfx, ‘Book Case_01’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/881409 Rkataky, ‘Type Writer’. Retrieved from www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/747324 zarinachudo, ‘New York Times’. Retrieved from 3dsky.org/3dmodels/show/ghazieta_the_new_york_times