My goal here is to make a scene for a dystopian future. I wanted a bit of sensory overload and also to make it look like this is happening in a bad part of town. This will be made into an animation where the car comes down the street. stops at a light and then turns. Comments and suggestions greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Try watching some short clips on Vimeo and see that they all share some things in common. Find the ones you like, and apply them on your story.
In my opinion these are some easy ways to start:
- Blurry lights on every inch (that is the tendency…)
- Lots of people (creatures/plants moving) - you can get some for free too. Or just put droids carring pizza/Chinese food/weird stuff. They are the most easy to animate too
- Lots of smoke coming out from all the restaurants
- Lots of blur/bokeh in all scenes, to make it look like a dream
Hope it helps and if so, keep posting!
The overall problem with this shot is exposure. We see, for the most part, lighted objects in a sea of black, and a “Parking” area that points to nothingness. Three vertical columns representing a building’s side facade, but no front facade at all.
All that being said, however, I think that it’s a creatively-imagined and populated overall scene, given the action contemplated. I would use this shot as an establishing shot, and then (perhaps, as the car first enters) quickly move to a series of side-shots and follow-shots that serve to limit fairly-tightly what’s in-frame.
Fairly soon, I’d suggest putting some actual animated cameras and dummy cars (maybe stand-ins) – perhaps in a separate blend-file linked to this one – and pulling some “OpenGl Preview” animatics to see for yourself how the scene-framing might play out from various angles in the contemplated bit of action.
To that end, I wonder if the “empty block” on the left, now with a mailbox and lamp-posts in it, might not become a balance-problem. That pawn-shop on the extreme left side of the wide-angle establishing shot is going to be completely gone from that point forward, I think. Some of the features that are positioned high above the center of the street also might no longer be visible in a standard theater framing if the camera is dollying right behind the car (mounted to an approaching camera-truck).
Fortunately, “preview” makes that sort of investigating easy and quick: the results are accurate, and obtained in near-real time. You can say to yourself, “well, what if we try this?”, and in a matter of a few minutes’ time be looking at it. (In fact, you can set up the whole darned movie this way, before you shoot it.)
Thanks color pixel. I will see what I can learn from that.
Thanks a bunch! I am on it. Also working on filming a robbery in a local convenience store and putting it into the liquor store on the left.
Yeah – set up the set like you think you want it, initially using various geometric shapes that are to scale on a set that is also to scale, and very-early start running OpenGL Preview cameras through it. Maybe even do a few rough edits, even in your mind’s eye. You inevitably will find that things need to be moved-around on set to accommodate your shots, or vice-versa. You might initially fall-in-love with a prop or a shot, only to abandon it. You might realize that there’s an empty space where a prop should be. Better to find out such things early and cheaply.
But then, you can do “take-offs” of measurements, camera tracks, and so forth directly from that mock-up to use in the actual production. You can one-by-one swap out those placeholders with links to the real thing. So the effort was never wasted. One day you hold up the actual shot to the “pre-viz,” and it matches.
This workflow is sometimes called, “Edit, then shoot.”