FACEPOCALYPSE

I always enjoy seeing how other artists work so I’ve put together this little process insight post for the last cityscape.

I should note all the setting photos are provided to me, as are most signage graphics (like the Krishna Cola graphics). I occasionally design some signage but that’s not my role on the project. Although I do have to make the flat colour vector graphics look like real billboards, neons, or whatever they’re meant to be.

Here is the original photo for this scene. Actually, it’s a few photos stitched together.

As you can see it’s well composed, but nothing too fancy. Very dark, actually. The focal point will be the Coke parody sign. The animated scene will also have cars driving around.

Since there are a lot of backgrounds to do I usually iterate on the fly to save time, but this is for the opening scene of the animation so the director wanted to see some options early. Spent an hour or so putting the first round together, then a few hours pushing a second round of thumbnails after retouching the original photo (while waiting for feedback).

From here it’s just tightening everything up and structuring the file for animation. The grading layers are on top so they affect animated objects as well, lights are layered so they can be tweaked to flicker and parts of the image are bulked together for parallax or projection onto 3D geometry if the scene requires.

Here’s an overall process image:

Hope this was useful. Not quite as glamourous as painting it all from scratch, but it’s about the final result. Feel free to drop me a line or post here if you have any questions.

Full size backgrounds are on my folio site