Function

Function is a student film created at SCAD. It was created over the course of one academic year, or 9 months, and was directed by Abby Spencer. It is the story of a newly created robot named Blu trying to find his function in the world. I worked on it as a lighter. This film won a Red Dot: Junior Award. It also was part of the RiverRun International Film Festival.

I did the master lighting for the first half of the film, which consisted of lighting for sunrise-twilight. The video above shows three shots that I did both master lighting and shot lighting for; I composited the first two shots in the above video as well.

Lighting

The following screenshot shows my master lighting setup for the film:

I used an HDR, an area light in the window on the right for a fill light, and a dimmer, cool colored area light at the back of the shed, on the left. I used a spotlight at the window for a keylight. Since I had to have my lighting transition from sunrise to twilight, I rotated the spotlight around the shed, to mimic the sun rising and falling, and the moon coming out. I also keyed color and intensity for the spotlight. For shot lighting, I added lights for highlights and rimlights, as well as additional fill lights, as needed.

Abby was very concerned about render times, so I was only permitted to use atmospherics to create god rays for certain shots, as fit her artistic vision. This was located in the keylight.

The HDR was one that I took myself, pictured below:

Since you cannot put an image sequence inside an HDR (such as one showing a timelapse day to night), I managed to change my HDR from a daytime HDR to a nighttime HDR through keying the colors of the Color Gain and Color Offset in the “Color Balance” of my image file in Maya, pictured below. Abby and I had thorough communication of timing to make sure that this was keyed correctly, timed to the already-done animation.

Lighting for Blu’s Light Bulbs

Additional lighting was needed for the light bulbs on Blu’s head as well. Abby wanted them to blink on and off to express his thoughts, such as “ah-ha!” moments he may have throughout the film. An example of Blu’s light bulbs being lit up can be seen in the first shot in the video at the top of the page. I achieved this using a point light and an emissive material, illustrated below.

I put one point light each in each of Blu’s light bulbs, and I also added a yellow-white emission onto the metal of the bulbs. Then, I adjusted the brightness of both until I found the brightest they could go without being grossly blown-out. I set those values as the brightest Blu’s light bulbs would glow. I then gave this information to the rigger, Joseph Gai YunHao, and he implemented this into the rig, so that the animators could animate it with ease.

Poster

For the SCAD senior films, the crews are required to design 3 posters, one each quarter, for their films. I helped a bit with the second poster for Function. Abby gave me a rendered image, and asked me to touch it up in Nuke for her. Below shows the before and after:

I added the glow in Nuke, and also made Blu’s hands a little more blue, as the crew thought they looked too green in the original render.