Sunday, February 11, 2007

coralicious

So, I've been working on my coral sequence this week, and I need some help. Here's all the unmoving parts of the foreground for the coral sequence (I have various fish and moving sea-grasses and such as well).....it's a panning sequence, so you never see this whole thing at once -- it starts with a pan down through the water to the lefthand, colourful side, and then moves over to the bleached stuff on the right.

My question is, should I make the white-ish thing there (just off the right side of the big middle "divider" rock and the finger coral) into something colourful so that the colour/bleached change isn't quite so sudden or complete? I think I'm doing a bad job describing this, but hopefully you get the picture.

If so: what's your opinion?


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey colleen. this is mark

NICE BG! I think I get the picture, but I didn't really understand what you were describing hhehe. I had this idea that you could create a bit of anticipation by making it go from "colorful", then to shadow, then to like a ridge or cliff, and then beyond the cliff is all the wasteland after that.So the antipication would come from going past a shadow (or a dark rock like you have) until it covers most of he scene, where the viewer is left with a little bit of suspense. So I would think to make it more dark and drastic, rather than more colourful.
Is that watercolor?

Anonymous said...

I love the color! It's beautiful. I'd say maybe make the little corals on the rock look at little less bright and sick so it looks like a coral disease that is spreading and slowly killing off the wonderful happy coral? Gah! I'm not a very good judge of these things though...
Either way it looks beautiful!
-laura

Anonymous said...

Colleen: This is Chris. The internet on this computer is uberslow, but this picture downloaded at least.
Seeing all this REALLY makes me wish that I was in Vancouver to help all you guys. Not that I have anything to say that's better than any of your genius classmates, but I wish I could watch these films grow. Sad face!

As for the coral, I like what Mark had to say... though it sounds like it could be a lot of work (maybe I didn't quite get it). If you want to make it more gradual, it might be worth throwing a few stocks (stalks?) of dead coral before the transition rock, and a couple colourful(ish) ones that are "holding out" on the right side. Not necessarily that big white one, although that might be a good idea too.

However, I kinda like the idea of a really sudden transition - but with that bit of suspense, like Mark suggested. A really simple (but fast) transition is the old forced-perspective trick... so you have something really big cover the whole screen (it could potentially be that rock) and then when it passes, everything is white and dead.
Oh yeah.. and if you have the energy to animate fish (yeah right, it sounds like your hands are twice as full as they should be as it is), you could have a few darting away, frightened, just before the big transition bit arrives.
Oh yeah, and just so that the big thing doesn't seem too unusual, it would probably be a good idea to have a few larger (blurred maybe) objects in the very close foreground, so the viewer gets used to the extreme parallax.

Man. I haven't done a 'crit' in forever. It makes me so sad! Because it's so fun! And I've missed so many!
Promise you will make more films that I can help out on. :p

Love,
-Chris
(I have no idea how I suddenly remembered that this was your blog.)

robotim said...

Hey Colleen!
I see what you mean about the coral...maybe that big patch of seaweed to the right of the rock (the one farther in the background) could have a slight sickly green tinge? So you don't go directly from bright color to no color at all?

-Tim

colleen said...

Thanks, guys! I think I'm going with Tim's green tinge idea....when I put it into after effects and added all my colourful fish the transition was less sudden, so that worked out well!
Chris, I like the close-up and blurred idea, though I'd be a bit afraid that it would stand out since the rest of my stuff is so flat and non-perspectivey...I think I'll try it though!