Jury Room

My next task to complete was the jury room. If you remember, this room was meant to originally contain still puppets in a jury, with a judge puppet in a mechanical fortune teller box that would decide the girls fate. Due to time constraints, the jury was axed and just the judge remained. I had started building the judge and his belongings, as seen below, but it was becoming obvious that this idea was not going to work as time was pressing, and even when the model was finished, Dan would still have to skin and rig it.

Myself and Dan C had a discussion and decided on a new room idea, axing anything to do with a judge all together. Instead, this room would have a rocky cavern on either end, with a foggy floor, and at the sides nothing but blackness, a no-mans land, with an echoing voice asking them the question that would determine their fate.

To construct the design of the room I built 8 rocks and used a tutorial from the following website to create a texture completly frrom scratch:

http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://vandelaydesign.com/images/textures/plaid.jpg&imgrefurl=http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/photoshop-tutorials-textures/&usg=__u_jrhieQMPxAL-2azbYrtKP5bb4=&h=301&w=300&sz=16&hl=en&start=41&um=1&tbnid=a_NToJhlGUq4fM:&tbnh=116&tbnw=116&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dplaid%26ndsp%3D21%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D21%26um%3D1

The tutorials on this site are easy to follow and simple to adapt into your own designs. I reccomend them!

I positioned the rocks, using the camera angles Dan C had already set keys for, allowing me to know the space the camera would be viewing, so I could frame the scene effectivly. Once I was happy with the poisioning of the rocks, doors, and 'love or hate' lights that I had built, I attempted to make fog for the scene.

I had never made fog before, so I researched some tutorials online. The one I used was:

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/simple_fog/simple_fog.html

and then proceeded to conduct some tests:

After a few tests, I realised fog wasn't what I was after at all. It was just so static. I decided that smoke would be the way to go. Dan C showed me the basics of how to make smoke and other effects using dynamics and particles in After Effects and how to animate them. I had never used After Effects before so he gave me a run through of the key features. I picked it up pretty quick, as it was very similer to Photoshop, which was good! Armed with the basics, I then created the following smoke tests which made it into the final cut of our film (but more about compositing later :P