Sarasota Film Society - Movie Theater Mayhem
Don't you just hate those pesky cell-phone users? They are always so annoying and they ruin the movie atmosphere! This was a fun collaboration for Sarasota Film Society that I worked on with a colleague named Jackson Dunson. We wanted to create something that felt cinematic and throw in a surprise to convince movie-goers to keep their cell phones put away. It was a great experience overall and we wanted to incorporate some humor to the piece. Hope you like it! And remember... enjoy the movies!
Cinema 4D, Photoshop
For this project, I had many roles throughout the two and a half week timespan. I focused on making the scenes come to life by creating and developing the overall look of the city and movie theater. This included making the buildings and theater, modeling and animating the helicopters, lighting the scene, and putting all the pieces together with compositing and VFX techniques. I enjoyed diving into many different areas throughout the project in order to create the final look.
For our first pass, we dove right in and tried to work on as many elements as we could. At first, our minds were heading in the direction of a playful animation that looked “cartoony”. I experimented with using 2D fire to give the animation a stylized look, as well as exploring the idea of toy-like buildings. Everything that was made resembled a fun and playful mood but it didn’t really match the message of destruction and chaos that we wanted to create.
Our second pass of animation was already dramatically different from our previous version. The overall all look and design improved tremendously once we worked out the issues that we had before. The buildings now looked more realistic, and the incorporation of real fire and smoke pushed the new style further. The characters also experienced some modifications. The robot was retextured to have a rustic look and the 2D character in the theater were redesigned to be less abstract.
Our final pass really brought everything together. I continued to tweak the overall look of the city by making sure everything was more visible. I added more detail and elements to the buildings, incorporated volumetric lighting for the helicopters, and inserted sky elements to create more contrast. Many other things were added and adjusted to make sure that the viewer wasn’t taken out of the moment. The project came a very long way from beginning to end and I loved seeing where it came from, and how it turned out.