Week 2: Kick-starting the Project!

Continuing where we left off?

It was a rather slow start during this week. Since we all received a bit of a (non-physical) beating last week on our choices for the FilmRoom project, we went back to the drawing board and started image hunting once again to find some better scenes. Finally being part of a group we quickly managed to get together a bunch of interesting scenes, however on Monday we were already asked to start off pinning down the perspective of the scene in 3DS Max using the new perspective match feature. So temporarily we decided on one of our scenes and started plotting down the basic shapes that make up the room in 3DS Max.

Our chosen scene was from the movie "Raise the Red Lantern". A rather unknown Chinese movie from 1991. We decided to have a go at the following scene:

The main reason we decided on this scene was because it was different. Oriental furnishing was something in particular that interested me in doing this particular scene, but I also likes the lightning and general warm feel to it.

I quickly put together a basic block out of the scene and tried to get the perspective right and ended up with this:

I think I managed to get the whole thing down quite accurately, however there was a slight problem that I had with the lamp standing behind the sofa sort of object on the right at the back of the room. The lamp is actually supposed to be much further into the middle of the room, while in my version it only seemed to line up being further back towards the wall.

Later on this didn't matter too much, as we progressed onwards within the week...

More Change of Plans.

So after leaving Monday behind we finally had our visual design sessions on Tuesday. At the same time this was also the start of a streak of doctors appointments both in the surgery and hospital for me, but thankfully I was able to juggle those around my studies without much interference. As the day went by we were eventually told that we were going to present our scenes once again on Thursday, meaning that there was once again the chance for our tutors to turn around and say that we can't do what we chose to do.

This ultimately put a hold onto our development of the project. Not knowing whether we would get a pass for our chosen scene we only sparingly did work and waited for Thursday to come along. I went back to our possible scenes and created a quick presentation to show off what we intended to do.

When Thursday finally came along we presented our scenes and got told that while all the scenes we chose were good options, the one we decided on doing was one of the weakest ones. With our tutors being the target audience of this project it would've therefore been an unwise decision to stick with our chosen scene so the next day I quickly assembled a mood-board and took a print out into the labs to ask other students for opinions. Here are the scenes that I presented to be chosen:

From top to bottom the scenes are from the following movies: Drive (2011), Pulp Fiction (1994), Logan's Run (1976), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Skyfall (2012).

I first started off asking fellow second years on the course and I quickly saw a pattern rising. The most popular movie scene was the pink room from The Wolf of Wall Street, which was quickly followed by the blue room from Logan's Run. Slightly popular were also both the scene from Drive and from Pulp Fiction, while only a very few people seemed to like the scenes from 2001 and Skyfall.

I would've been okay with doing the pink room, however I first wanted to know what third years thought, so I went upstairs to get some opinions from people who spent a year more on this course and while many people once again likes both the scenes from The Wolf of Wall Street and Logan's Run, there was a significant increase in people who also like the scene from Pulp Fiction.

Personally this was also one of my own favourites and I think that it would be a lot more interesting to go for that scene than the other 2 favourites. A quick discussion in the group later and we finally decided that we would do the scene from Pulp Fiction. We then quickly also decided to start planning out the project and creating an asset list, before heading off for the weekend.

The Work Begins!

This concludes the week and we are now ready to start fully working on the project and I am excited to see this scene slowly beginning to take shape. Within our group we are using a Facebook group to keep track of each other's work as well as Google drive to share files between the group, which makes it easy to work as part of a team. Hopefully by the end of next week I will be able to show off some concepting work and us taking apart the room into bits to see what exactly is going on~