Lefty & Boomer @ The Stark Gallery

The version of the short that showed in the Stark Education gallery from November 9th to the 22nd. It's near complete, but I still wanna fine-tune some lights and animation, find some missing effects, and render higher-quality passes before I unleash it upon the world.

Shot 1: Second Pass

Beauty

(Frame 1) We start with a mandala-esque top-down shot of Boomer's room.

 

 (F48) Crane down to get a better view of the dream machine illuminating the room.

 (F92) Continue craning until we see the screen that allows him to see the outside world.

 (F157) Settle behind the dream machine as he pulls a rope.

 (F192) Whip-pan under the stairs as he pulls a higher rope.

 (F220)

(F265) Whip-pan behind the projector as he freaks out.

 (F305) Settle on the eye feed as we cut to our next shot.

 Dream Light
This light provides most of our lighting, except for frames 192-220 as Boomer ascends into shadow.

 Top Light
That's what this light is for; sillhouetting Boomer so that he can be seen in frames 192-220.

 (These ones)

Story Reel

Shot 140: 2nd Pass

I animated the lights moving into more favorable positions on the whip pans, upped the contrast on Boomer, and downed the contrast on the background.

Shot 180: Eva's 1st Pass

The camera actually pans from under the stairs to behind Boomer, so I asked Eva to render both positions.

Under the stairs.

The key light is coming from the paintings.

The rim light is coming from the dream machine.

The fill light is coming from the projector.

 Here's how they all look together.

 

Behind Boomer.

Key

Rim

 

 

Fill 

 Beauty

Shot 160: Regina's 1st Pass

 Here's an overhead screencap to show the layout of the scene.

 

Our key light comes from an off-screen source we never see.

The rim light comes from the computer keyboard.

 

The fill also comes from an off-screen source we never see.

 

The edge light come from the pov.

And here's how they all look together.

Shot 060: Eman's 1st pass

 The light from the screen is the key light. 

The light from the dream machine is the rim light.

 

 The lights from the paintings are the fill lights.

 

Here's how they all look together.

 

And here it is in motion.

Shot 050: Nick's 1st pass

The light from the dream machine serves as the key light.

The light from the screen serves as the rim light.

 The lights from the paintings serve as the fill.

 Here's how they all look together.

Shot 040: Dark Boomer

Boomer is now silhouetted in his respective frame to further conceal his identity, and contrast him with the much lighter Lefty.

Lighting the Monster Shot (140)

Whew! This shot... THIS freaking shot nearly killed me. On the positive side, I do have lights that look good from every conceivable angle, which should make lighting the remaining shots MUCH easier.

Compositing

Shot 150 (Hue Animation Test)

Testing animated hues on a scene where Boomer sinks from a seething rage to a defeating depression and hands the narrative emphasis over to Lefty, whose... also sad.

 

  The hue is adjusted by feeding the "Key only" sequence through two hueCorrect nodes, the start hue and the end hue, and animating the Mix attribute in the corresponding Merge (over) nodes. I tried "Set key on all knobs" on one hueCorrect and Merge node, but it didn't seem to do anything.

  

​This was actually Cassie's setup for Stage Fright, so I'm not exactly sure why she didn't just feed the depth map through the filter attribute of the ZDefocus. Applying the Zdepth sequence as a depth map to the beauty sequence via a ShuffleCopy node in nuke seems to work just fine after adjusting the focus in a ZDefocus.