Hello! I am Thalia Valencia-Murphy, a current junior Visual Effects major. I am very grateful for the opportunity to continue to work on my personal skills while working with a team and getting great feedback from professionals in the industry.. After meeting with the mentors, we were able to introduce ourselves and get an overview of the upcoming class. We were placed onto small teams and tasked with picking a product to create a short commercial for.
Now to introduce you to Team Beluga:
Thalia Valencia-Murphy: FX Artist and Compositor
Dee Divakaran: Motion Media./ 3D Generalist
Galina Bovykina: FX Artist
Emma Schaberg: Lighter and Modeler
First we began with brainstorming what kind of commercial peaked our interest. These are some of the commercials we started with and tried to pick things that were short and to the point, but still within our skill set.
A Watch commercial with interesting mechanical procedural effects and motion:
Would be much harder to pull off, but cute:
Mostly looking at one character with particle effects.We liked the shiny aspect of the commercial.
After some discussion, we landed on doing a perfume commercial. It would give us room to focus on lighting and fx. We thought of the possibility of adding motion media, but we decided to keep it limited. These were the two reference videos that we found that is the sole inspiration for our project.
This was the primary commercial for our project. It shows some of the lighting techniques that we would like to use with the display of the bottle. We also referenced some of our FX work, such as the pyro, to enhance the commercial.
This was another good reference that shows the bottle and the camera movements we would like to use.
With that thought in mind we began contracting our pitch, which is displayed here:
We decided to do a commercial on a perfume called Guerlain: Cuir Beluga, honoring us with the team name: Team Beluga.
This is a quick look of our storyboard provided by Dee that displays the different shots of our commercial.
Here is an unboxing commercial that will give us reference to the bottle itself along with some history that Dee found about the bottle and why it has the bee embossed.
We do have a stretch shot goal that is honey dripping down the. bottle. Instead of doing viscous fluid that may take some time to perfect that we may not have, I found another way to create a semi-liquid look using both VBDs from particles and pyrospread. The link to the technique I found is here. That is only if we get to it, but it could be another interesting effect.