July 17, 2023
Operation: Deli Platter
Has war really changed?
When watching films I have always been obsessed with cut-aways.
B-roll, pillow-shots, establishing shots without much to establish.
I experience them as a break. A section on the film’s timeline dedicated to taking it all in and catching a breath from the story. And I love them!
A thought from the book Beauty by Roger Scruton stuck with me.
Scruton argues that the importance of beauty and its transcendental nature can be found in anything that’s real.
For example, nature can be appreciated as beauty pure by itself.
There are some things that when you read them, they just sound right.
This is one of those statements.
The organic shapes and colours of nature carry enough wonder to be considered beauty by itself.
First things first, we need a high-definition desert.
I’ve been using Waleed Nabeel’s Desert models. For the purpose of small scale 3D-renders they provide enough detail to look believable.
The asset above is the one I’ve used for the renders below:
Positioning the camera was a matter of storytelling. In Operation: Deli Platter UN-soldiers have landed in the desert.
The story is mainly shot on a 50mm lens.
Deciding what lenses you will be using is an effective time-saver that also connects the narrative visually.
Having dynamic lines in the frames, especially diagonals, is also a key part of Deli Platter’s visual language. For that reason, the camera is placed to follow the curve of the dunes.
Alright, let’s talk lighting!
I knew I wanted something dreamy.
And I knew I should listen to Roger Scruton.
For that reason I broke down the lighting into having two objectives.
Simple enough right?
The left side of the dune felt more appealing to me at first. I’m sure the lighting could’ve looked good from the right as well, but the shape-language reads left-to-right to me :)
To not break the night-time illusion I opted for a soft light-source.
This could be a military spotlight or any other source of artificial lighting.
Now onto the surreal. The effect was quite easily achieved with a variety of Area lights pointing down.
The idea was having pockets of ethereal light illuminating the distance.
This was easily achieved with a Cloner and a Random Effector.
As long as your lights are high up in the sky, they will cast volumetric light-streaks. With a bit of Scale, Rotation and Position randomisation you can achieve a pretty beautiful effect.
Finally, I used a Global Volume in Chaos Corona with a soft density by setting the Distance to 500cm. And that’s it!
Once this set-up is completed it can be used for any shot in that scene.
This next shot for example used the dark side of the dunes to create a backlit effect. There is a little bit of spill from the lights that provides the detail in the darks.
The stars were made with our Organic Starfields pack that includes 32-bit (high-dynamic range) star maps extracted from real NASA stars.
I hope this was a useful breakdown! And thanks for reading :)
Have a great sunday! Cheers, Leo
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