Lighting Your Scene

1. For my Key lighting, I created a warm spotlight:

2. For the fill light, I threw in a slightly green low intensity spotlight:

3. For the rim light, I threw in a cool intense spotlight:

Building a Scene in Maya

1. For my Key lighting, I created a warm spotlight:

2. For the fill light, I threw in a slightly green low intensity spotlight:

3. For the rim light, I threw in a cool intense spotlight:

Special Effects and Live-Action

My first two term paper scores were both above 80; I will not be writing a third term paper.

Outline of Third Term Paper

Winston Gregory

Phys 123

Alejandro Garcia

Outline for Third Term Paper

Explosions in Scale

Intro: Miniature models at times create a much more believable environment than cgi rendered backgrounds. We can see them brilliantly used from the space crafts in Star Wars, to the stunning castle in the Lord of the Ring series. However some of the most brilliant use of miniatures are when they are fused with the special effect of explosions.

At the beginning of the early 2000s, when Computer Graphics was starting to blossom in the film industry, many of the first effects that were created were explosions. Now a days, with major block busters like the Avengers and Transformers, movies goers are desensitized to the constant barrage of cgi explosion effects. Some may argue that movies are starting to use a bit of their magic by going away from practical special effects. However I argue that both of these effects can be just as useful with the use of convincing miniatures.

Paragraph 1: In the 1984 classic action movie The Terminator, a tankard explodes when a character throws a bomb in the trucks back pipe. The explosion of the vehicle, which looks amazingly realistic, has fooled audiences into think that the speical effects team blew up an actual real tankard.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9lw3ndQpWc
• Because the explosion was going to take place near a police stockpile of ammunition in Los Angeles, the film makers decided that they could not blow up a full scale tankard.
• The miniature was built a sixth of the scale of the actually downtown place
• The shot was slowed down to make it feel like it was too scale.
• 42 charges were set off to get the realistic effect!

Paragraph 2: The business: Fonco Creative Services uses miniatures to create believable models for movies. When creator Fon Davis first saw Jurassic Park, he moved fast to adapt his skillset to the current use of Computer Graphics, however he was surprised to find out that computer graphics actually worked well for miniatures, in which he calls it a hybrid approach to visual effects.

• the example we will be looking at is a scene in the matrix, when a ship crashes into the human city of Sion.
• It uses the practical effect of the 30 food miniature moving through the gateway, with lighting and cgi explosions along with a mix of lightning strikes.
• The used large ships called bigitures.
• We you see miniatures in film, you don’t notice them. The best special effects are the ones you don't notice.

Conclusion: CGI and practical explosions can both make convincingly believable action scenes in movies with the combination of miniatures!

Character Animation

For my project I decided to animate with legos. By far the hardest part of this sequence was have the robot walk. In order to do that I fastened the robot to a cellphone charging chord attach to the bottom of my bunkbed to provide the lift and drop in the walk. It was often difficult because it was hard to get the right pose needed in my walk. Tape was used to help track the feet. In order to get the proper timing I wrote my whole animation on an x sheet for my  robot. The sounds were provided for a website called freesounds.com.