Location L.A.

This project was completed with with the help of Louis Clark. We wanted to create a deserted city for integration into a live action plate.

My focus on this project was in creating an interesting composition and cinematic colors. Some of my references were from Lawrence of Arabia (obviously), Rogue One, Mad Max, Dredd, and the Martian (references below). There was a wide variety of desert colors and initially I wanted to move towards a super saturated red-orange like from Mad Max. Over the course of the project, however, I decided a yellow-orange was more suitable.

I loved this plate, the only downside was that it was static. So to give it a little bit of motion I decided to project the FG cliffs on some cards and create a small camera move.

Next I needed to flatten the area screen right to place the city so I created a quick DMP.

I wanted to add something very close to camera so I started looking on Pexels for a plate. I happened to find a great clip of a close up desert cliff with a subtle camera move. The camera from the plate happened to match up with what I wanted to do regardless so I tracked that camera and used the ledge while keeping the rest of the main plate.

It was now time to scuff up Griffith Observatory. I decided to use Photoshop for this because it had been a while since I last used it and wanted to stay sharp. Below is the before/after.

I wanted to add a dust storm occluding the observatory for the first part of the shot to give it a Planet of the Apes style reveal. My hope is that the brief sense of tension will help to tell a story within this shot.

I accomplished this using a series of noise patterns on cards placed at various distances from the camera.

Then the city was brought in. It was composed of 4 layers of increasingly taller buildings. There was an issue getting the building colors to work so I had them rendered as one color with a variation on saturation. I would use some keys and grading techniques to fake it in comp.

The Condors were a last minute add to give more life to the scene and push the feeling of this dead city. They were found in a plate on Pexels and quickly extracted via keys. I also stabilized them so I could animate them myself and get more control over their flight path.