Gart230 Blog- Week one, Initial ideas

For this project we were tasked with creating an environment based upon an environment from a film or television show of our choosing. Upon receiving this brief I had a couple of main ideas which I wanted to explore, the first of these was to do recreate an project from the TV show grand designs as I currently hope to specialise in architectural visualisation after leaving university and feel that focusing on this area early could be beneficial to my future plans. I started looking into some of the different housing projects featured within the program to try and narrow down a list of potential options however I quickly began to realise that most of the projects featured where on a much larger scale than this specific project called for as they featured multiple distinct spaces as opposed to one environment as such I decided to move away from this initial idea. I then decided that if I were to work on a film/television environment I wanted to pick one where I could really lean into the visual effects and lighting aspect. This decision was made to contrast my course focus is primarily on virtual reality where you have to be very conservative with Realtime lighting, reflections, post processing etc as performance becomes of much greater importance. I wanted to fully explore the opportunity’s presented by ray tracing a technology which I find very interesting but which is too costly to use in virtual reality applications at this current stage. With this being said I still want to keep my workflow relatively VR friendly so I don’t fall into bad habits and thus I do not intend to utilize normal baking or trim sheets to the same extent as a conventional artist as these do not translate across to virtual reality well. With these constraints in place I settled on the series John Wick as it features very distinctive lighting highly atmospheric environments which I think will be fun to emulate. I was torn between two scenes in the original film, both set in the fictional red circle nightclub, one which takes place in the clubs main hall and the other which takes place in a bathhouse below the club itself. These two scenes are synonymous with the John Wick franchise and so felt they would  probably be the easiest to find references for as they feature prominently in the films promotional material. Having looked at both scenes in more depth I decided to settle on the Bathhouse scene as I feel it offers me the best chance to explore the possibilities offered by ray tracing in both lighting, refraction and reflections as the scene features lots of water and glass both of which can greatly benefit from the advantages offered by ray tracing. I was also drawn to the distinctive red and blue colour scheme as it will help to differentiate this project from my other work and give me a chance to look at a more stylized form of realism which I have not explored in depth before. Over the next week I will be collating references from both the film and the shooting locations to try and build up a more comprehensive understanding of the scene as a whole to make it easier to start blocking the model out.