Unit 8 Part 1

Our brief for unit 8 part 1 was to design a set for a story that takes place within The Sandman comics. We were put into groups consisting of Production Arts students and Acting students, so that we could work together to produce a final scene, using green screen to place the Acting students' performance into our digital set.

I collaborated with another designer, Natalie, and four acting students. We could pick between a few different scenes from The Sandman comics. We decided to go with episode 0, a scene in which all of the siblings meet together in Destiny's Realm to discuss an important matter. We picked this scene, as we felt that it demonstrated the dynamics between the different siblings, and we were also inspired by the visuals of Destiny's Realm in the comic book.

In the comic book, Destiny's Realm is a garden with a large maze and a palace in the centre. Natalie and I were drawn to the grand, classical architecture illustrated in the comic book and decided to use that as an initial starting point for reference.

While the acting students began the research and rehearsal process for their performance of the scene, Natalie and I started researching and sketching for the design of the set. We first put together a mood board, looking at classical architecture, Ancient Greek gardens, mazes and greenery.

Inspired by the arches, columns and domed ceilings, I did some initial rough sketches of what the space could look like.

After meeting together and clarifying exactly what the space looked like and consisted of, we both created some pieces of concept art.

Dana Vasile

Natalie Jiang

Natalie Jiang

The concept art helped us to solidify the mood and atmosphere of the scene, as well as the design of the set.

Next, we moved on to working on the 3D model and technical drawing. After discussing our different strengths, we decided that Natalie would create a Sketch-up model of the basic structure of the set, which I would then take into Blender and use to add details and textures. After that, Natalie would create the technical drawing from her Sketch-up model, while I did the green screen video editing. We both found that splitting up the tasks in this way made the way we worked very efficient.

After Natalie did the Sketch-up model, I imported it into Blender and added in the architectural details, like the column bases, arches, balcony, domed ceiling and plants. Next, I textured everything, added lighting and an HDRI to make it look like sunset.

While doing all of the design work, we were regularly meeting with the acting students to film their performances. After our first filming session, we found that we needed to be more prepared for our next ones. Because of this, we decided to storyboard everything for the next sessions in order to use our time as efficiently as possible.

We came across a number of challenges while filming. We discovered that we had to be very careful with how the camera and actors were positioned in order to ensure that they were always in front of the green screen. We also found that we were quite constricted when it came to getting a variety of interesting shots - we had to find creative ways to film full body shots and shots from different angles.

After filming everything, I took the footage into Final Cut Pro to key it. Then I placed the footage into the Blender scene and edited the lighting and RGB curves of the scene and footage, so that they looked more seamless.

After rendering all of the footage in Blender, I imported the videos into Final Cut Pro to piece the scenes together. I also added background sounds and music to add to the dramatic atmosphere. For our final products, we ended up with two scenes. We decided to do two so that we could experiment with the dynamics between different characters and also try some different angles.

Overall, I am happy with our final scenes - especially the first scene, as I feel it looks more realistic than the second one. I have learnt a lot while working with green screen. In the future, I would try to prepare for the filming sessions more and also think more about the hair and costumes of the actors, as they sometimes created some issues while keying out the footage.