Animatic and pre-production continued - 21/01/2016

After my storyboarding and with ideas running through my head, I decided to get my shots down in an animatic with some provisional sound made by my compositor at the time. This just gave me a better understanding of how the shots connected together and the timing and types of animation that would be required for each shot. I added a few shots from the storyboarding stage as i saw appropriate, in order to link shots together and for the story to flow. Below is a link to my first animatic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4NjvqG-3Mk

As I was thinking about my, what now became a short film rather than an environment walk through, is how I would make it evident, that the car has just been born and is in a recuperating chamber. So, I had the idea of having the car ascend from a movable bench from a cloth like layer of water. Something like a water based shell, like as if it was being water born. I tried and tested the Vray water material (as I decided to render my short film out in Vray), but the best i got was a bubble like look. Below are the tests I had done:

Although the glossy/glass type look was desirable, it was not what I wanted to achieve. I did not want to spend too long on attempting to get the water correct and so decided if I did not get the look right within a week, I would not include it in my film. 

Having mapped out my animatic more or less, I decided to do a few look frames to try and stage how my animation would actually look. I used default Vray Materials and different lighting techniques to achieve looks. I build some rough models and a layout that I thought might initially work. Referring back to my storyboard, I imagined the chamber to be in a cave like area to begin with, so I wanted to carry this through. In the look frame the environment is made of rocks and boulders. I mainly used purple and a goldish yellow. Looking into Freemasonry, Purple Gold and Blue are really prominent colours that occur again and again. I tried to incorporate this into my scene with the lighting. The look frame was lit with single rect lights at different intensities and directional previews to achieve the looks below:

This is how I imagined my film would look approximately. When applying the Vray materials, I wasn't entirely sure that I would get the realistic look I wanted to achieve at the time. The materials looked a little flat but I had put it down to the models and that perhaps the materials were not reflecting due to the edges or that the specularity wasn't high enough. I did not want to continue testing in the test file as I felt I would be more at ease testing on the actual models I build.