Week 1: Project Pitches

The goal of this collaborative class with The Mill is to integrate a vehicle into a live action scene that will then be enhanced with effects

In our first class meeting we were split into our teams for this collaborative project. My team, Team Crimson, is as follows:

Bua Kanjanapongporn: Look Dev and Lighting

Clarisse Chiang: Look Dev, Lighting and Compositing

Joleen Zhang: Photography, Effects, and Compositing

Riley Barnes: Effects

Our goal for the week was to put together a project pitch to present to the mentors at The Mill for feedback. During our initial brainstorming we were inspired by car commercials that included energy effects. Initially these included both lightning effects and glowing particle effects, but we were particularly inspired by the below Mercedes commercial and chose to go with the latter.

The forest setting and glowing light featured in the commercial reminded me of bioluminescent effects, and I found the below video as additional inspiration for effects we could use.

With these ideas in mind, we came up with our idea: A car drives through a forest area with whimsical particles around it that trigger a magical, pulsating effect in its surroundings. Initially the effect would be faint, but as the car moved through the scene it would continually grow stronger. With this idea in mind, Bua sketched out some initial storyboards which she later refined by painting over images Joleen created in Forza Horizon 5.

We discussed what kind of car we wanted to use, and since we were going for a glowing energy effect we decided we wanted a car that looked more futuristic. With this in mind I went to CG Trader and found several options for my team to look through together. We eventually decided to use a 2020 Porsche 718 Cayman

Reference

Model from CG Trader

We then started considering locations with a forest setting where we could film. Joleen went to both Wormsloe and Skidaway Island during the evening and shot some footage of each location. She went during the evening, as we discussed shooting later in the day so the energy effects would stand out more.

To create the initial previs, I took a scene Riley created in Houdini into Maya and animated the car and camera movements to roughly match our storyboards.