Yr 2 Week 1: Film Room Introduction

For the second year of Game Art Design we have been asked to create a new blog which can use features such as SketchFab or Marmoset Viewer, which is a little saddening as I was quite fond of my old blog and didn't really want to start a new one, but I guess it creates a fresh start to my second year.

The first project of the year is a group project, which I have heard is the first of many group projects to come. The brief is to create a scene in UE4 of an iconic or interesting scene from a film or television series, with one of the main aims of the project seeming to be about organising the workload between our team members. There are 6 members of our group, and we had no choice on who we are to work with for this 5 week long project, which is a little worrying but I’m sure the tutor would argue that in the industry you are unable to choose your partners, which is true, but the industry is also a very different environment where people are obligated to turn up to work and do their part, while in university it is easier to get away with not doing so.

Game Production

The first class had us introduced to our groups and decide on what we wanted to do for our film room scene. Each of us all had different ideas on the kind of theme we wanted to go with, and I began to look at some old-fashioned styled interiors which I thought would be challenging yet interesting to model.

I began by looking at the interior for Sherlock’s apartment in the television series Sherlock. I always found this to be quite an interesting room with an interesting story, as it is a modern day depiction of the famous investigator; and his apartment is quite eclectic featuring furniture from very many eras with quite a strong atmosphere and almost eerie lighting which would have been fun to recreate in a scene which really tells a story and reflects on the mystery of the series.

I then moved on to look at The Grand Budapest Hotel, as it is a film well known for its spectacular interiors and also features quite quirky furniture from many eras whilst also having a strong and bright colour palette. Though at this point my group had decided they wanted to create something quite dark and moody, such as a cellar so this wasn’t really an option, as much as I would have loved to have challenged myself with this personally, it may have also been a little bit too big of a project for us currently.

The film we eventually came to a decision on is the 1960 horror film, Psycho. It was suggested as a few of our group members know the film quite well due to studying it for English in the past. Personally I have never seen the film so did not have much opinion towards it; we were never going to find a film which all of us had seen without it being very stereotypical and cliché. It also reflected the dark atmosphere which our group wanted, as it is a horror film and the room we chose to go with is the room of the murder which takes place. One interesting factor about this movie that will be quite challenging is that the film is in black and white, and we now need to decide whether we would like to translate this into colour or whether we would like to keep it black and white with subtle hints of colour such as from the lighting, which I think is probably the correct way to go.

Following on from this, our group then created a quick white box/place holder scene in UE4 for our chosen room; the motel bedroom. This was mainly to have a reference to where everything goes as the room is only ever shown at close up angles and never from a distance, so we had to peice together the information from each frame in the film to figure out where each object should be, and any additional room decor we may need to create. Along with this it also provided us with a good base to place our assets into, to ensure that they all fit together nicely in the scene. We have decided lights will be a large part of our scene as mentioned above, and tried to show this in our white box where possible.

Visual Design

Along with this, in our first Visual Design classes, we were taught about Composition in more depth; expanding away from simple composition such as the rule of thirds and the golden ratio, etc. And we began to look at more complex composition structures such as the golden rectangle, the rebated square and classical armature, among many others.

We were shown many examples of how these compositions are used in classic artwork from the old masters, and shown some modern day examples from films such as Blade Runner. James Paick was mentioned quite frequently as he has an extended guide on composition focusing on the rule of thirds in more depth, which I am meaning to look into more when I have some spare time to do so.

I decided to apply some of the rules from classical armature into some of the scenes from Psycho, my group's movie choice for the Film Room project, to see how the compositions in these scenes had been thought about and used.

All of the scenes throughout the film seem to rely extremely heavily on the rule of thirds, but the film also makes good use of the golden rectangle quite often and has some more in-depth compositions throughout. ​ You can see in the above images that some of them work quite well compositionally, but some of them seem quite random. I wanted to analyse more of the stiller images more closely, but I also wanted toanalyse ones relevant to my scene for the project, so had a difficult time trying to find examples of both of these things that work correctly.