City and Lights

Not like other scenes, the city scene will be the only scene has both 2d and 3d sequence. So Loanne drew outline of the city first and gave it to me so that i can work on 3d effects and editing on After Effect.

While she was drawing the city, I was playing around with making neon sign in maya.
I found the tutorial on youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eucvqSzRpTA
I reckon this is really easy because i can make it only using hypershade, no other dynamics, particles and mental ray. Also it can be used as glow effect or others.
I will use this effect to the lights around the e4 building.

Below picture is the first example I played around with.

I made lights around the e4 building, but it doesn't look well enough as I though with the white backgrounded buildings. What I expected was it would look shiny and glowy in the night. However, the glowness was blended into the white background and doesn't look matched with 2d as well.

So we discussed how we can make it look good and found there is "toon" menu at rendering menu set. It gives much more tidiness and look of 3d and 2d at the same time. I squashed the spheres so that can look more 2d-ish and rendered with toon.

For the compositing the city, I broke down loanne's 2d city to 3 parts - front, middle and back sections and put them as 3d layers. To give some sense of depth of field, I added gaussian blur to back and front section.

After add the lights and clouds.

Moodboard

I was deeply inspired by this short film that I watched in FMX fextival in sttutgart. It is called "Nuit Blanche". Here are the video and making video.

When I planned the city scene for our E4 project, I reminded this clip and knew it will be the first thing to be put on my mood board.

Space, Flashing lights, Eyes, Snapshot from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.

These are the moodboard for city generally. I am quiet obsessed with eye and blurred flashing lights picture, so I added them on to it. Snapshot from 2001: A Space Odyssey gave me a sense for the room. The space pictures gave me vague idea for the last E4 logo scene but it didn't came to me clearly yet.

The Dali Atomicus, photo by Philippe Halsman (1948),Ascending and Descending by M.C. Escher, 3D modeled Relativity by M.C. Escher and Lego version of two pictures.

Above images are collection of optical illusion pictures. I put them because like the moving image i found and posted earlier, these pictures gives sense of deja-vu and surrealistic feeling.

Brief storyboard

Me and Loanne met up in the library after the FMX trip and quickly drew a story for the E4 project. 

The clip starts with blinking eye, which is a medium that connect the world and us.

Scene1 connects to the picture in a book in scene 2, book is a old form of media.

This scene connects to the scene 4, which is a screen of a tv. TV is an important two dimensional of a mass media because it can deliver not only live action but with sounds.

Now the camera zoom out from the room to a city, which means the city is filled with all this kind of rooms and media.

And it turns right in to a picture in an ipod screen. Since ipod video released, it evolves to one of the important way to get information, being upgraded to ipod touch, iphone and ipad.

Zooming out from the ipod, it blends into an white background and it turns to a giant E4 logo.

By all these, the clip means E4 contains all form of media and you see it.

Loanne will draw through scene 1 to 7 in 2D and I will make 3D models and special effects through scene 7 to 12. Whole duration is only 10 seconds so I reckon it is important to draw/make scenes look clear and easy to understand.

Inspiration

  At first, me and loanne were inspired by an animation called "Love & Theft" at the FMX conference. The animation starts with a dot in the middle of the screen and it develops to different shapes by a music progress and it changed to series of different facial expression at the climax and finished with a dot again. It was really simple 2D animation but it interacted with music really well and gave the feeling to the audience that they are absorbed into the animation. As we have provided tunes from E4, we wanted to try something similar to this animation.

  After the fmx, I found this deja-vu image on the internet. The image expresses deja-vu feeling visually with 8 repeating images.

I also reminded director michael gondry's smirnoff ad.

I think above three works are narrated by the stream of consciousness, and by this way, the animation / ad has something draw attention from the audience subconsciously.

Stream of consciousness, the continuous flow of sense‐perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue. The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the stream of consciousness is the subject‐matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it. In the second (literary) sense, stream of consciousness is a special style of interior monologue: while an interior monologue always presents a character's thoughts ‘directly’, without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, syntax, and logic; but the stream‐of‐consciousness technique also does one or both of these things. (Wikipedia)

 I found it's really interesting way to continue storyline by the objects which stimulates association. As a tv channel, E4 is strongly connected with media. So we came up with a concept idea of making animation with objects that can be used as a media such as books, magazine, screens, etc.