Final Renders and structuring

At this stage, I had all the matinee cameras set up roughly from the Alpha and Ideas presentations although they still required a bit of editing before I could call it a finished product. Transitions inside the matinee are zero concern to me as the footage can just be heavily edited using Sony Vegas afterwards. As long as the overall media I want is recorded in the matinees, I can cut down each areas where required .

As you can see from the prior presentations below, the camera would have started, looking towards a sign before slowly panning towards the vehicle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XtubGsEV1Q

This segment needed a full overhaul as I hadn't even considered the rule of thirds whilst setting these up. Instead I created the camera in relation to what I envisioned as a final project with heavy editing. This would have focused on the sign before allowing it to blow away via wind and gradually building sandstorm to show the sheer force. Obviously with my huge focus on PBR techniques, this was no-where near possible.

After receiving feedback from multiple lecturers, I found that the best course of action would to have the vehicle displayed in the far left sector, the background sand dune, highway props in the centre and the flaming barrel asset right up to the camera on the right hand side. This new set-up may seem rather simple but makes a world of difference. It focuses the viewer's eye on to the barrel, before transitioning this directly to the car, pulling away from the empty space, A simple camera trick but a mighty effective one.

On top of this, it was suggested that I find some way to incorperate the sandstorm effect slowly rolling in, altering lighting levels to do so. Thanks to my opacity over distance node graph, this was as simple as rendering out the matinee 4 times. All I had to do was change two node values and change the global illumination value/ sky colour to match the lighting conditions brought on via the sand. This added a fair bit more motion to the scene as you can slowly see the sand-storm rolling in across each pan but best of all, it gave me a fantastic final transition with the entire highway becoming consumed with sand as the sun dis-appeared below the horizon.

Editing wise, I had to throw all four complete renders in to Sony Vegas, ensuring that the cuts and transitions were located at the exact same positions on each render. I then rendered out each one individually before re-importing them so they could be easily transitioned between.

As you can see, I also rendered out a version with the vehicle displayed as just a wire frame although i found it to be far too un-fitting in the finished project;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKfyYAxYKmM

For every stage in this process, I received an endless torrent of feedback and found this to be essential as after 10 weeks of work, I had become my worst critic.

The next and final post will give a breakdown of the final video presentation alongside a project evaluation.