New Shots

catalogue image and text

My workexplores the notion ofcinematographyusing the 3D animation toolset.The focus of which is the use of camera angle, camera movements, continuity, close-ups as well as composition.By practical research and experimentation I wish to heighten the audience’s understanding of the narrative and their enjoyment of the piece.

Story introduction:

By 2084 Humans have explored to the edge of the Milky Way. Our heroisthe captain of a cargo shipNO. 007 of The Earth Defence Army and his task is to recycle space junk at edge of the Milky Way. On one such mission he finds a UFO. He has never seen such a strange craft before but he recycles it anyway. After recycling it he is surprised to find the craft still occupied. He thinks the alien must be from an advanced civilization who was planning on visiting the earth as anemissary... 

After a series of adventureshe takes his new companion back to earth. However the emissary turns out to an experimentdesigned by Earth scientists to try tounderstand physiological changes caused by living in deep space. Unfortunately our herohasbroken it... ... This is an ironical story that the humans are teased by their science and technology development.

image for MA book

Camera Movements

Authentic camera movements, like their human- movement equivalents, never happen without a stimulus or motivation. Camera movements divide into three kinds of motivation.

Subject-motivated, where the camera follows a moving subject or adapts to a changing composition. Relatively passively, it adapts to keeping a subject in view. 

Search-motivated, in which the camera’s “mind” actively pursues a logic of inquiry or expectation. This mode probes, anticipates, hypothesizes, interrogates, and even goes ahead of the action.

Refreshment-motivated, in which the camera simulates the human tendency to look around when we run out of stimuli.

Camera movements generally have three phases:

Initial composition (static hold making an initial statement fefore the camera begins movement).

Movement (with its particular direction, speed, and even its subject to follow, such as a moving vehicle).

Concluding composition (static hold after the movement, making a concluding statement).

Camera movements from a static position

These include turning, looking up and down, and looking more closely.

Pan (short for panoramic) shots occur when the camera pivots horizontally, mimicking the way we turn our head to scan a horizontal subject like a landscape or bridge. Direction of travel is indicated as "pan left" or "pan right".

Tilt shots are similar, but the camera pivots vertically to reproduce the action of looking up or down the length of a vertical subject like a tree or tall building. Direction of travel is indicated as "tilt up" or "tilt down."

Zoom in or out is made with a lens of adjustable focal length. Zooming gives a forward or backward impression of movement, but picture perspective actually remains identical. This is because the size proportion between foreground and background objects stays the same. For perspective to change, the camera itself must move.

Traveling camera movements

These occur when the camera moves through space- up, down, forward, sideways, backward, or in a combination. Traveling camera movements impart a range of kinesthetic feelings associated with walking, running, approaching, climbing, ascending, descending, retreating and so on.

Craning (up or down) is a movement in which the camera is raised or lowered in relation to the subject. The movement corresponds with the feeling of sitting down or standing up- sometimes as an act of conclusion, sometimes to acquire a better sight line.

Dollying, tracking, or trucking are interchangeable names for any horizontal camera movement through space. In life, our thoughts or feelings often motivate us to move closer to or farther away from that which commands our attention. We move sideways to see better or to avoid an obstacle in our sight line. Associations with this sort of camera movement include walking, running, riding a bike, riding in a car, gliding, skating, sliding, sailing, flying, floating, or drifting.

Crab dollying is when the camera travels sideways like a crab. The equivalent is accompanying someone and looking at them sideways as you walk.

Reference:

Rabiger, M. (2008). Directing Film Techniques and Aesthetics. The Oxford: Elsevier.

Space Continuity

According to Mascelli(1965), telling the story as the action moves from one place to another involves space continuity. An expedition documentary, an auto trip or a travel picture are typical examples. To be acceptable, a logical pattern of movement must be shown. It is also possible- as with time continuity- to move back and forth in space, to speed or slow travel, or to be instantly trasported to another location; providing that the abrupt change in continuity is understood by the audience. Viewers should always be aware of location of action, and the direction of the movement. That is the only way the audience will know "from where the moving players or vehicles are coming, and to where they are going."

Space is rarely portrayed in a motion picture as it actually exists, except in a single setting; and then it may be condensed or expanded by physical, optical and editorial techniques. Illusions of space may be created in various ways. Space may be stretched or shortened through employment of optical transitions. This result can be attained by simply skipping unimportant areas; by altering spatial relationships; by ingenious editing and by imaginative story-telling. A simple dissolve may cover hundreds of miles. Filming only areas of special interest, or different types of terrain, may give the audience the impression they are seeing the entire trip- although only highlights are actually shown.

The pictures above are from Wall-E made by Pixar in 2007. From them the audience will have the impression that they are seeing the entire trip, the earth's atmosphere, the moon, the sun, then go out of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Choice of lens focal length may drastically change perspective, the distance between objects or the relationship of the players and the background. Clever editing may convince the audience that they are viewing all the travel. Inventive story construction may provide means of moving about in space, so that a great deal of territory is covered; while the viewer is unaware that much of the travel is really missing.

Audiences have been conditioned to accept the removal of needless travel, so for instance, that a player may be shown leaving his office on the tenth floor and immediately dissolve to the street entrance. There is no need to show him walking down the hall, taking the elevator, emerging and walking through the lobby.

Reference:

Mascelli, J. V. (1965). The Five C's of  Cinematography. The United States: radstone publications.

The pictures above are from Wall-E made by Pixar in 2007.

Shot_06 AO Testing

Lighting design is definitely important for a piece of animation, not only improving the storytelling but also making the scene more realistic and believable. However I do not have enough time to render Global illumination and Final Gethering as I want to put more focus on my research and practice working rather than rendering. So I need to find another way to improve its effect in term of Ambient Occlusion, like the picture below. 

According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion, Ambient occlusion is a shading method used in 3D computer graphics which helps add realism to local reflection models by taking into account attenuation of light due to occlusion. Ambient occlusion attempts to approximate the way light radiates in real life, especially off what are normally considered non-reflective surfaces.

Unlike local methods like Phong shading, ambient occlusion is a global method, meaning the illumination at each point is a function of other geometry in the scene. However, it is a very crude approximation to full global illumination. The soft appearance achieved by ambient occlusion alone is similar to the way an object appears on an overcast day.

Ambient Occlusion

diffuse only

combined ambient and diffuse
Obviously there are more details and more beautiful depth after combination.

Ambient occlusion is most often calculated by casting rays in every direction from the surface. Rays which reach the background or “sky” increase the brightness of the surface, whereas a ray which hits any other object contributes no illumination. As a result, points surrounded by a large amount of geometry are rendered dark, whereas points with little geometry on the visible hemisphere appear light.

Ambient occlusion is related to accessibility shading, which determines appearance based on how easy it is for a surface to be touched by various elements (e.g., dirt, light, etc.). It has been popularized in production animation due to its relative simplicity and efficiency. In the industry, ambient occlusion is often referred to as "sky light."

The ambient occlusion shading model has the nice property of offering a better perception of the 3d shape of the displayed objects. This was shown in a paper where the authors report the results of perceptual experiments showing that depth discrimination under diffuse uniform sky lighting is superior to that predicted by a direct lighting model.

The occlusion at a point on a surface with normal can be computed by integrating the visibility function over the hemisphere Ω with respect to projected solid angle:

                                   
where is the visibility function at , defined to be zero if is occluded in the direction and one otherwise, and is the infinitesimal solid angle step of the integration variable . A variety of techniques are used to approximate this integral in practice: perhaps the most straightforward way is to use the Monte Carlo method by casting rays from the point and testing for intersection with other scene geometry (i.e., ray casting). Another approach (more suited to hardware acceleration) is to render the view from by rasterizing black geometry against a white background and taking the (cosine-weighted) average of rasterized fragments. This approach is an example of a "gathering" or "inside-out" approach, whereas other algorithms (such as depth-map ambient occlusion) employ "scattering" or "outside-in" techniques.
In addition to the ambient occlusion value, a "bent normal" vector is often generated, which points in the average direction of unoccluded samples. The bent normal can be used to look up incident radiance from an environment map to approximate image-based lighting. However, there are some situations in which the direction of the bent normal is a misrepresentation of the dominant direction of illumination, e.g.,

In this example the bent normal N_b has an unfortunate direction, since it is pointing at an occluded surface.

 

In this example, light may reach the point p only from the left or right sides, but the bent normal points to the average of those two sources, which is, unfortunately, directly toward the obstruction.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion

Lighting Test of Shot_01

one point light

AO Pass

Combination

Definitly there are more details on the object after combining.

According to my previous research the lighting effect in the space is hard so I just use one light for illuminating. There are three types of lights in XSI, point light, spot light and infinit light. After testing, I choose point light finally, like the picture above, as shot_01 is a long shot which will last 20 seconds, I need to make sure each image is relatively nice. Also it could be naturelly fall off which is essential to avoid audience having misunderstandings. 

I will render its z depth pass and AO tomorrow and when I finish its materials and textures I will render other passes.