Month: November 2020

THE ART BEHIND GHOST OF TSUSHIMA

Post author By Antoni Coll Florit
Post date 20th November 2020
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Ghost of Tsushima was released the 17 of July, and since then a lot of people enjoyed it, talk about it and one thing that stands out of the game is the visual art and storytelling capabilities. I personally enjoyed it a lot playing the game and just walking around discovering more and more places around the world of Ghost of Tsushima.

I like to take this opportunity and explore a bit more but this time, the behind the scenes of the games. We are gonna discuss a few aspects of the art, we are gonna see from concept arts, storytelling desitions and narrative and final looks and how all this was created.

We are gonna start with some concept art. The next images are from the ideation and design of the main character, we can see all the preparation and sketches created. There are a lot of designs that most likely didn’t go throw till the end of the production.

As we can see, there is a lot of design and ideas, here we can see a more final look to what’s gonna be in the end referencing the sketches seen previously.

Here you can see a more advance sketch with colour to design more how is gonna look, and the process until the final look idea, not the look in the game.

Here are some designs ideas and research for other secondary characters and enemies:

We’ve seen some of the processes behind the design for characters. Now we are gonna look into a bit of the idea behind the cinematics and also some of the environment sketches and starting process.

This is some of the ideas for the environment a bit more developed with colour and you can see better what’s gonna look like at the end. And here is a first look at the development of such an environment already a bit more advance and implemented in a 3D world.

Now, a big part of this game is about the story itself, and how immersive it is. So I would like to share with you a few of the storylines and sketches that made the end result that good.

As you can see, when a storyboard is done well and with a clear idea, the end result explains a lot better the story in question and it makes it easier for the rest of the team to build this magic moments ingame.

I encourage you guys to play this game because its a masterpiece, the story, the looks of it, and the gameplay its really cool and super well done.

MA Visual Effects Term One Terms Visual Effects Fundamentals

ISO AND FOCAL LENGTH TEST

Post author By Antoni Coll Florit
Post date 19th November 2020
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For the second week of the course, I rented a camera to test what we learn during the first and second week. I rented the CANON 5D MARK3.

Here are some images I took changing some settings every time a shot one.

***f/22 – ISO 8000 – 1/15s*** – ***50mm***

When I took these photos I set the ISO to be automatic so it would light properly and we can see some differences. We can see that the background on each shot is different and more blurry than the previous one. This is because of the focal length. The smaller the focal length number is, the more light lets in. Here are some other examples.

This are some shots I took that I think they look cool.

MA Visual Effects Term One Visual Effects Fundamentals

NOT THE HISTORY OF VFX

We are gonna identify and discuss some of the techniques, genres and formats that have been used in several films. I have not seen a lot of these movies but we are gonna discuss a few clips we have from the presentation.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)

A musical, comedy and terror movie, where they have used a mix of techniques. We can see in some shots that there are actual VFX components where it was probably difficult to achieve the same effect with practical work. But there are other shots where we can see clearly that are practical effects, most of them where the character interacts with the effect that’s implemented in the shot. We can see an example of this in the next images:

The left image is an example of VFX where the right one is practical.

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)

American werewolf in London is a terror film with comedy touches and use a lot of practical effects, most of them are makeup. You can achieve an amazing effect when done well. This is an amazing example of SFX.

GREMLINS (1986)

A comedy/horror/fantasy movie is captured in digital where all they use is practical effects with the gremlins and others sets. Digital captured makes it easier to implement practical effects to the shots. We can see an example of this here:

THE ABYSS (1989)

The abyss is done with VFX, they have a wide variety of VFX techniques and well implemented to the shot. It’s a science-fiction movie recorded in digital. This helps with the VFXtechniques in the film.

INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996)

This movie implements really well practical effects like miniatures with the live shot. They also VFX implemented and mixed with the practical one.

BLADE RUNNRE 2049 (2017)

Blade Runner is an action movie, captured in digital. This helps to implement all the effects, both practical and visual, being VFX and SFX in every shot there is no other way of recording this. In the video embed before you can see either both types of effects.

MA Visual Effects Term One Visual Effects Fundamentals

VFX INDUSTRY 2

Today we are gonna look at a few more experienced roles in the industry. This usually would be the entry-level to a company as a junior and then you obviously can progress and become senior, lead… etc.

CONCEPT ARTIST

A concept artist is in charge of the creation and design of any asset, characters, environment and any related product that needs to be designed. Basically, everything that you see in a final production one of the first steps that have been done is usually the concept artist generating ideas and designs, so the team can decide which direction to follow.

MATTE PAINTER-ARTIST

This artist create painted representations of landscapes, sets, and other locations as backgrounds for scenes. This is done because it can be impossible to find a location like the one that you need or very difficult to record using digital or traditional techniques.

PREP/PAINT ARTIST

This role is dedicated to cleaning up backgrounds of live action-footage, preparing it for the effects to be layered onto it by the compositor. There are a lot of processes used to do this, they remove dust, scratches, sort out dropped frames, basically, anything unwanted is removed by prep artist.

COMPOSITING ARTIST 2D/3D

As I said on the previous role we talked, the prep artist removes anything unwanted from the shot, and the compositors are all the contrary. They have the job of adding and layering various elements in the shot. They work with other VFX departments to solve problems to release a photo-realistic final shot.

Design for Animation, Narrative Structures & Film Language MA Visual Effects Term One

RESEARCH PROPOSAL

This past 5-6 years while I was either doing personal work or Uni assignments there are a few questions and topics that interested me and I always wanted to do a bit more research on it or at least learn a bit more of them.

VIRTUAL PRODUCTION – CAMERA TECHNOLOGY

With camera technology, I’m referring to Blade Runner 2049. On the last year of my Bachelor degree, we went on a trip to the VFX Fest in Stuttgart, where I attend a really interesting talk about how they did the camera movement on Blade Runner 2049. It was basically with an Xbox controller, and that choked me and I always wanted to lock more into it.

REAL-TIME RENDERING

There is one video that got me into real-time rendering, Adam: Episode 1. This is an amazing project where everything is rendered in real-time, at any point in time you can pause the video and look around like a videogame, these guys are just amazing and I would love to know more about this technique. You can see the video I’m talking about here.

SFX/VFX/PRACTICAL CREATURE EFFECTS

I don’t really know much about the world of SFX that I like to research more of how they work and how can they be implemented with VFX.

FACE CAPTURE

Face capture technology is evolving really fast , we could put this and real-time rendering together.

MOCK-UP/ PROP MAKING

I would like to research how they work with the mock-ups in movies, for example when they recreate an entire city at a really small scale and then integrate that with real world.