Collaborative project

 

Dissertation

In this part of the project, we wanted to transmit the feeling of the main character feeling destroyed by the rythm of the city. Therefore, in the first shots we try to give the feeling of claustrophobia, stress and frustration. Then, the girl strarts breaking up as a doll, as the city killed her and she feels destroyed.

I think the visual metaphora we used is pretty clear, and the narration is quite linear and easy to be readed.

 

Critical conclusion

It has been a rough jurney in order to complete this part of the project, but sometimes is with the mistakes with the thing you learn the most.

In my opinion, we tried to do a lot of things that we did not know how to do. Therefore, that allowed us to learn a lot but at the same time we could not have a result which matches the quality we wanted to obtain.

An inconvenient I noticed the most at the beggining, was the codirection with me and Adrian. Even if we had the same idea, we wanted slightly different things when recording. That made the crew feel a bit confused on what to do. I think this happened because we did not have enough time to plan the shooting and everything as good as it had to be. Therefore, we still had our own ideas in mind, and they should have been discussed and unified before the shooting. Anyway, we could sort all the thigns out and keep going on with the project.

Then, I think we plan the project not being really realistic with the deadline and the amount of time that we need to get things done, specially if it is the first time doing this kind of effects. Therefore, we mainly focused on get the first part done, and even so there are still more things to fix. All this inconveniences made working with this project to be a bit unpleasant experience, since it was really stressful seeing that we could not get on time and we needed to give up the shots before we thoguht we were ready. But this teached me how to handle better deadlines, pressure and the frustration of not getting the results you want with the shots.

I would like to improve the VFX because they look pretty fake. I would like to try to do the cracking with an egg shelf, since it would make the integration easier. Then, I would like to improve the arm falling, since it looks werid when it changes from the 2D hand to the 3D one, and I think the integration can also be improved. I also would like to make the smoke effect myself in Maya, and do more stone footage to make everything more realistic.

I also feel that the background should have been graded before merging it under the image, since it has a totally different color than the main character and so it is not possible to grade the shos correctly.

On the other hand, I improved my skills a lot with this project, specially with the hand shot. I learned how to make animations in Maya, how to make the destruction animation, how to create good textures and also lighting. Then, the integration of this hand was really hard, since it is a real organic element and you could see the real hand right before it, so the integration needed to be perfect. I think I could still imrpove it, but I enjoyed working on it and I think the result is not completely bad.

I also explored how to merge Photoshot and Nuke techniques, using it in order to make the parts in which she is broken.

In conclusion, going through the process of getting this project done was pretty rough, but I have learned valuable things and I would love to push me a bir further and still working with it until I achieve a result which is nearer to the one I was expecting.