Monday 22/3/21 - Response to assembling my identity

Looking over my moodsheet I wanted to create work in response to some of the inspiration found on the sheet, both as an excuse to practice using Blender and Unreal Engine (The programs I'm planning on using for this project) and it gives me a chance to experiment with ideas.

I decided to base my work off three different sources: The Weeknd's Starboy album photoshoot, a piece called No Turning Back and Victor Hugo's ink drawings.

I chose these because they all had aspects that really inspired my work in the past such as the concepts for the Altered States project. They're all really interesting photos all for different reasons, I love the Starboy album photoshoot for the colours as it uses a contrast between red and blue alongside light and dark. For No Turning Back it was one of the primary inspirations for my filming experiment.

Victor Hugo's ink drawings show these very dramatic scenes that I find really interesting to look at, especially because despite the lack of colour it still looks amazing. I feel that what they are depicting can be up to the audience.

In response I wanted to combine these aspects and create my own album covers, I decided on album covers thanks to the Weeknd's photoshoot as I felt it would be a creative way to experiment with ideas. Whilst this doesn't touch on the idea of suspense, I felt that experimenting visually would be the best start since it would help me develop the storyboard and give me inspiration for shots to incorporate into the film.

For the album art I chose to use two of my playlists to help give me the title and a feel for what the art should be like: I also wanted to recreate them as the artwork used as a base was not my own so I wanted to redo them with my own work. These were the prexisting covers I used for the playlists that I would be using as a base.

Whilst they'd act as inspiration I wasn't necessarily going to simply recreate them, I wanted to use the moodsheet as the main focus. As a starting point I wanted to get some initial practice before jumping into making new versions of the covers. I decided I would use a 3D model and style the render in a very similar way to how the Starboy photoshoot looked. For the model I decided to extract a character model from one of my inspirations for this project, Halo ODST.

Once imported into blender I placed a blue light so it would shine onto the character model that I would be rendering.

Next step involved creating a cube and changing it's material properties so that it would emit a red glow. This was pretty simple to do. I just had to turn up the emissions strength and change the colour to red alongside the cube's actual base colour. I then put in another light to add some red hitting the actual character model.

This was the final outcome after I moved and angled the camera

I was really happy with this outcome since it was just an experiment but still turned out exactly how I wanted. To improve I would have worked on posing the model so I could experiment with different angles and shots however, that would mean I'd have to rig the model to move like a person. Something I won't be doing until later in the project.

Because the next work took longer and was over the course of the next few days, I decided to separate the posts.