The Anniversary - Color and Lighting.

To give The Anniversary that distinct 1950's/1960's feeling, the color choices we made had to be really careful. Agfa film does a lot of unexpected things from my point of view. It desaturates when I would expect it to saturate and vice versa. Everything seems to be tinted warm, but blues can be very vibrant or very grey. Reds can pop right off the page and darks become blacks very quickly.

I posted just a few of the references I gathered below.

Act 01

At the outset of the film, as a viewer we wouldn't be aware that the Old Man was visiting the grave of his wife. That would be revealed in the third act. We set it up to look as if he was meeting his wife at their "secret" spot on their anniversary. I kept the colors warmer but relatively desaturated for Act 01. The Old Man goes about get dressed up for an occasion in positive spirits and makes his way up a hill towards a woman on a bench...

 Act 02

As time passes from one year to the next, we see that the Old Man has lost the vigor of Act 01. I dropped the warmer colors closer to green and lowered the overall ambient light. Where ass my shadows were mostly warm purples, almost browns in Act 01, I start to really introduce cool grays into the scenes and the weather has taken a turn for the worse.

 Part 03

As another year passes, things get even worse. I pushed the saturation and the richness of the shadows in the interior scenes and we took care to show that the house had been neglected as the Old Man lost interest in his yearly ritual and even life itself. It's nice to see the color mood swing from beginning to end here. At his lowest, on the verge of a breakdown at his wife's grave, the Old Woman he passes every year on the bench comforts him and gives him hope. Cue the saturation as the storm clouds break symbolizing a new beginning for them both.

It's a shame were unable to continue this project, but a number of factors got in the way and we had to move on. But that's how it goes and the time I was able to spend on this during my 1st year at Brain Zoo was invaluable to prepping me for so many of the projects that have followed.

Pepe and Lucas - Color and Lighting 02

Time and budget are so often the vehicles of change. We had a little under a year to go from start to finish and remain within our goal budget as well as finish in time for the following year's animation festival entry requirements. As we entered the lighting/rendering stage we ended up re-examining the lighting. In my previous post, I uploaded the color keys from our original take on Pepe and Lucas. It was an almost noir take on lighting and color. Dark darks with highly saturated pools of light and all sorts of reflections from a recent rain. The unintended result was a huge render time for all of those reflections in a very expansive environment. We also had to put in a ton of unanticipated effort to control and push back/pull forward those lights so we could maintain the proper focal areas around our characters. Sometimes the results were a little noisy. Beautiful for some shots, but hectic for others. As our deadline grew closer, my director, Mo Davoudian, our lighting TD Mario Kim, and myself, got together to discuss how we could still make our deadline but still tell the same story we set out to do in the fall of 2011. We decided to move our lighting in a new direction that wouldn't bog us down at this crucial junction, and so I recreated the color keys I'd done earlier. You can see the results below.

01

We decided to go in a brighter direction. There were still shadows cast on the square from the adjacent buildings, but nothing disappeared into deep shadow anymore. We got rid of the rain puddles and toned down the lights, but maintained the dramatic magic hour lighting. While we had really liked the idea of pools of shadow and pools of light, another unintended result was a sometimes high contrast on the characters' faces which made them appear inadvertently severe.  With the new lighting direction, the overall result was that the tone became much more fun and comedic, which softened the extremes of the dramatic moments, but I think for the best. Now that a few years have passed, I can see how our original approach may have hit a few notes too dark and serious. With the brighter, more pleasant lighting, the comedy elements stepped forwards more and scifi elements like the clown gadgets and the mime imagination props felt appropriately ridiculous and whimsical. In our darker version, the "fun" was lost a little.

02

One of the unintended results of the change in lighting was a change in the weather and therefore the cloud formations. You can see in the matte paintings I posted, that I created them after we made the change. In my earliest environment designs, you can see that the clouds are very low and oppressive. The new sky was much more open with bigger, gentler clouds. I ended up spending a lot of time  creating stylized but still fairly realistic clouds that could hang lazily about. Just enough to break the flatness of a blue background sky.

03

While the darker take on the lighting gave the world a feeling that closely reflected the anger and frustrations of the clown and mime, I think the new color scheme worked equally as well as the clown singles himself out as a malcontent who cannot partake of the pleasant world around him.

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.

01

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.

02

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.

03

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.

04

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.

Color keys! for UP.

I took 25 days (almost in a row) this past December to try and build up my speed and color/light understanding. I took 30 minutes each night to create one color study from UP. I chose the beginning sequence since it's basically a contained short film on it's own with a beginning, middle, and end. To make sure I stayed speedy and really focused on identifying color, I only used one kind of scraggly brush and tried not to use the eyedropper tool at all. It's become such a part of my workflow, I confess I did eye drop over the course of these paintings, but I only slipped a few times. It feels very excercisy, but I learned so much about the color decisions that went into these sequences, and perhaps even more importantly, I often found myself noticing differences in the way scenes are light and colors are chosen compared to my when I do my own work. This is definitely the best way to walk a mile in another artist's shoes.