After meeting with Ed Mendez, the Co-Founder of Powerhouse VFX to establish the what the ten week course would entail and our options for a body augmentation or environment change project, we were placed into teams. Introductions were made and we began with coming up with a pitch to present to the Powerhouse Mentors. This is the Overgrown team:
Thalia Valencia-Murphy: FX Artist
Hannah Trujillo: Compositor
Emma Schaberg: Modeler/ Lighter
Xander Shou: 3D Generalist
James Kislenko: Outsourcing Rigger
After deciding on a body augmentation project, we needed to come up with some questions that would be vital to coming up with the idea to put forth.
For example:
What story did we want to convey? What is the person doing and what emotions are they feeling?
What effect did we want to have? Veins, fire, electrical, environmental? Did we want the effect on the eyes?
After sending many ideas back and forth with movie trailers and clips, these were our preliminary ideas
Touching an object that gives them power / a reaction
Angry, about to attack / eyes and body flashing as an intimidation tactic
Preestablished power
Hallucination/dream sequence
I found some potential video references and trailers and after talking with the team, we decided to focus on idea 1.
Project Power (2020):
Bloodshot (2020):
Bloodshot (2020):
We wanted to expand on the idea of our actor touching something and a mystical power takes over. First we explored a horror genre of a venom-like goo or vine infecting a person as it climbs up the arm, but after some discussion, we decided to go with a lighter theme that might have more context and story to it. So, our final idea that we stuck with was the actor touching a flower and the power from the flower begins to sprout vines that climb up her arm and onto her face. This was the idea that best suited our specialties.
Emma worked on the preliminary storyboard and concept design that would help guide the explanation for our shots and what we envisioned for our models and final outcome.
Xander worked on the preliminary Previs to further visualize our vision:
I collected some references to some glowing flowers and particles. I was trying to get something that would have a representation to add a bit more meaning to our story. My first thought for a potential meaning was rebirth. The flowers that caught my eye were lilies and daisies. Even though we ended up creating our own flower, it is something that still resembles a flower with that kind of meaning. I was able to find reference of the under the skin particles that we wanted to incorporate to show how the flower is affecting her physical body.
Hannah was able to find our location that is a half indoor/outdoor area that has an array of plant life around it that would give us options with our lighting.
Along with our location, we found our actress who would be willing to take part in this project.
Our next step for the next week is to begin filming. We have two filming dates. Friday September 23rd at 4pm and Saturday 24th at 1pm. We wanted to have two dates with different times to have some variety of lighting in the shots and pick which sequence of shots would work best with what we were going for.
Here is the full pitch presentation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VVcM-xTgYxX5yXsyiz1XmsuXyLXaloJbtgYKEFGru-I/edit?usp=sharing