Pepe and Lucas - Color and Lighting 01.

Color and Lighting 01

Doing color keys is one of my favorite parts of visual development. This is where you can really start to see a film come together for the first time. This is where you set the mood and enhance emotions. We set out with the goal of creating a comedy action short with scifi and romance elements. Action and comedy both create moments of extreme and abrupt emotions and so I was thinking of graphic punchy colors from the very start. On top of that, we were dealing with entertainment which has a natural theatrical element to it. As you saw in a lot of the visual development for the town square, there's a lot of competing colors in the building materials as well as in the sign lighting. To simplify this  and allow us to focus, we kept the buildings in cool shadows with strong warm lighting only on the first floor that casts out onto the street. This keeps things more dramatic and allows us to reveal the beautiful colors in the final scenes when the clown and mime have made amends and teamed up for a brighter future in showbiz. The other great thing about having multiple light sources is that it gives a natural spotlight effect and we can highlight certain characters and push others out of focus, or out of the spotlight, just like they might in a theater or circus.

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In the early scenes, I really used cast light from doorways and windows to create paths of light to guide our eyes toward the action.

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As the action heated up, I made sure to increase the length of the shadows so the characters and environments became more menacing. A lot of B horror film under lighting as the clownbots entered the story.

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By the time the mime returns to earth in her invisible imagination mech, I started really punching up the color and I intended for it to change instantaneously like stage lighting. The mime at her angriest, would be bathed in red light while the clown, who we think is dead at the moment, is spotlighted by cool, heavenly light. I shifted the sky to much redder and more magenta colors so everything feels even heavier and less intense.

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As soon as he reveals that he's fine (in this movie, characters have the ability to bounce back like your average Looney Tunes character), I planned to have the "light" switch back on and return to the original town square lighting. In our last scenes, our characters start fresh with renewed hope on a new day, a pretty standard movie trope, and we can see the world for all it's color and beauty. I should mention at this point that we set up the movie with high contrast colors at magic hour for a couple other reasons than I mentioned earlier. Just as my director and I wanted the lighting to match the emotional beats of the story, the overall time of day and weather were chosen to support the ensuing drama as well. If a new start in life is best demonstrated by a new day, then someone who's had enough, who's literally at the end of his wits would fit right in with a world that is at the end of it's day as well. We made it rainy just to make it a little worse. You'll notice that the bar and the outside world are lit much the same. Inside or out, it's the same. These higher contrast light situations certainly tipped things in a darker direction, but we were confident that the comedy and action would  prevent it from looking scary. Since the main characters' faces were developed with such a graphic look, the expressions didn't get lost on us in when they were largely in shadow.

Gridsmasher's Finale!

Here's the last of the concepts I created for Gridsmasher - the Smash Stadium interior concepts. This was one of the last things I worked on for this project, and since it was a combination of many of the other concepts I was developing, the variations occurred mostly in color. However, you can see that Grizz's observation tower went through a design change and a scale change. Originally, the director wanted it to look like it could be an old school giant robot that might as some point in the show activate and do battle against evil forces. However, it started to become very focal and so we simplified it to the lowest black and white sketch and shrunk it down so it wasn't so imposing.

Once we had the basic structural designs in place, the primary focus became choosing the mood and color palette. We knew that the goal was to have a lot of pop colors to maintain excitement and energy to simulate the most awesome event ever. In my first pass, I kept the light and materials fairly monochromatic so that the holograms would really stand out as bright warm colors against a very dark background of deep blues, blacks, and purples. In shows like Tron Uprising and movies like Speed Racer, I saw a great deal of success in using black and white as neutrals against which a lot of colors can be displayed.

However, this was a little too serious and dramatic. We changed tack to depict space not as a dark void, but as this fun and brightly lit place, so that when you're at a game, it feels like you're outdoors at a sports game during the daytime. Games like Homeworld or Wildstar have really beautiful palettes where space looks like a just a vast sky of color. I tried a bunch of different color palettes and different space vistas.

 This ended up being the guide for our project. An epic afternoon in space.

 I was still hanging onto my darks here. ;)

 I wasn't interested in painting space as sky blue, but leave no stone unturned.

Maybe a little atmosphere...

Marvel's Iron Man and Hulk - Heroes United

I had the tremendous pleasure of working on a Marvel project recently at Brain Zoo. With the success of the Avengers and Iron Man franchises, we were hired to animate a dvd feature film starring Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. My main responsibilities on this project included creating lighting studies to help establish the mood as well create several matte paintings for production.

Before beginning production, we did a test sequence, which can be found in the movie in various parts, of Iron Man fighting Zaxx at night. With limited time and budget and an emphasis on glowing effects, we took a very graphic approach. To help pop the effects, the movie takes place entirely at night except for the final scenes. We used primary colors a lot for the outdoor scenes -  an epic red dusk leading to a night sky to pop out a red and yellow Iron Man and a green Hulk. I didn't end up handling the lighting studies for the interior, but they're often dark rooms illuminated by the main superheroe's complimentary colors, red light and green light.  

Some of the above keys are a little bit styled. At the time, we considered having more 2D comic effects,  like speed lines for flight scenes and energy trails for Iron Man's boot/hand repulsers. We ended up abandoning those ideas, but the show ended up getting a nice 2D look, and no wonder, our creative director Leo worked on Tron Uprising!

When I'm tasked with developing color keys for a movie, a lot of times I'll go through the animatic and choose frames from key moments in the story or action that can guide the lighters through the rest of the shots and do really rough color keys. If time permits, I'll bring them to the level of the above keys or higher. This is helpful for the Brain Zoo team, but especially for discussing lighting ideas with clients.

Below are the matte paintings I created for production.

 A gamma explosion goes off outside city limits.

We were able to use one global sky matte for most of the film, but there were a few shots that required their own unique painting.  I painted in the shield helicarrier for guidance.

 Hulk and Iron Man fall from the Shield helicarrier to a graveyard just outside of town. There was only a center of town model that was an enclosed environment, so for all the wide above shots showing a whole town, I had to paint the town form scratch.

 Amazing, for one or two seconds, Hulk jumps up to the helcarrier from left to right, which of course requires a new matte painting since we have no real 3D town.

 Iron Man being chased by missiles flies by came in a wide arc and back again.

 The movie ends on a new dawn over the town. You can see a frame from the movie below. A lot of times my matte paintings sit way in the background and there's so many effects or such camera movement, you can't really pick any of the details out, but you get a nice uninterrupted shot here. I even separated the clouds out so they could be animated.

Skylanders Storyboards!

Skylanders Storyboards!

Skylanders Storyboards!

Skylanders Storyboards! My GOO!