During this week we scanned in images of a model wearing Japanese attire including a hat and robes. We could use these as the only character in our project to show that the story is attached to a real person and isn’t completely abstract, whilst still mostly only having objects for the majority of the project.

During this week I also finalised the rendering of the Torii gate scene, to establish location in the project. I used a few different tests.

Although I don’t think there is anything wrong with the render, it was difficult to keep a cohesive theme around our project in terms of style as we have a variety of different shots – some greyscale, some low lit, some full environments etc. This can lead to the project feeling a bit less connected and potentially in the future it would be better to decide on a specific colour palette, lighting scenarios, camera angles etc to better keep the project connected. I tried a lot of different lighting setups for this scene, but settled on this one.

I also rendered the tree growth shots in this week.

I think that I could have spent more time here with different lighting shots, as well as potentially previously in SpeedTree I could’ve given the tree bark more detail and attempted to use flower objects for leaves instead of the default flowers. However with the time constraints I could not have time to experiment with this. The model could’ve also been subdivided to give a smoother model though I ran into issues as the model was an alembic cache.

During this week I also thought about how I wanted to create the title text. I decided I would create this in After Effects, as the industry standard software for creating work like this. I had a few ideas, mostly to use blood or fire effects to show the title. As we were not completely sure on the title of our project yet, I thought that I could potentially think of ideas. I thought that flames would be better eventually, as blood posed technical difficulties and was harder to make look good. The main story of the “show” would be of vengeance, but I thought that this would be fairly empty if the entire show was just the main character enacting revenge and that was it. Instead, I thought that the word “grief” was apt, as the grieving process is one that often changes and evolves over time, similar to how a character can evolve and change over time in TV series. I searched the kanji for this to really push the theme of Japan, and also I thought that the flaming symbols would look very impactful and leave an impression on the audience. I also thought that the symbols would need a translated element beneath. After this I continued to build an idea for the scene with different elements associated with flames and destruction such as red smoke and sparks. Below is a title I took some inspiration from.

I also began to think about what effects would look good in our final compositing pass. I thought that having cherry blossom petals flying over the tree scene would make it feel a lot more dynamic and visually interesting than simply looking at a slightly swaying tree for 6 seconds.

I thought we should cut down some elements of the project, like making the doll blood splatter scene faster so that it is more impactful. I think potentially we could’ve used more short clips to be impactful in the second half of the project, as lots of media uses quickly sequenced changing imagery to push a feeling, especially of horror or negative events.

We met with our sound collaborators again this week with their draft. We eventually had to use this unfinished draft as they had joined our project late enough that it was quite difficult to get the animation to them on time, so they mostly had to create the audio without knowledge of what the final result would look like exactly – which must have been quite a difficult task for them. Nonetheless, I think that they did well to create something that fit the theme of our project with the little time that they had, though in the future it could possibly be refined a bit more.