Mikayla Fuehrer - The King and the Pawn

Finals Week is here and I am keeping busy lighting our film! We have a more established idea of where the sun is in relation to the house now, so I made adjustments to this shot. The first image is a render from a technical issue. It's not pretty, but I feel like it's important to show the technical issues going on since the blog is like a process book. I felt like the lighting setup that we have (which is gorgeous) was too strong for this shot, so I wanted to sort of tone it down so that the hand could stand out more without overexposing it.  This shot I think I've improved. I think the got the over lighting in the background working a lot better now.  I also like the lighting I got on the computer screen area too. What I think isn't working as well is the character lighting. I got David illuminated well to separate him from the background. That being said, I think its too harsh and casting very strong shadows. I got help from a classmat

My plan for week 10 is to refine the lighting that I've done so far. I had meetings with our director and head of lighting to make sure that we have a plan for continuity and a plan for each shot what the time of day is and where the sun is positioned in relation to the house.  Now that that stuff has been cleared up, I believe lighting shots in the real world will move efficiently compared to what has been going on, because a lot of confusion between us has been discussed.  For the chess world, lighting happens a bit differently because we are limited in certain areas compared to what we can do with Arnold rendering. Despite these technological limitations, we spend a lot of time refining the lighting to make it very appealing and we will continue to do so going forward.  I met with Ethan to get some extra help and I plan on sharing my work with him and Olive to get more consistent feedback as I go on the shots I'm lighting. We believe this will help them get

This week was full of shots to get lit.  This shot I tried to just refine some more and get a nice rim light of the pieces. I think there was some continuity issues though with other shots and so I need to go in and change the light source to the other side of the house. Also the textures for the chess pieces got updated so stay tuned for their new look!  This shot I needed to update the textures on because we have darker colored couches now and it definitely helps the focus stay on the character's hand now with the contrast there in the textures. I also wanted the audience to be putting their focus onto the hand, so I added a strong key light to it.  Below are really rough starts to lighting. I'd consider them more of 'blocking' if that makes any sense. This week I ran into quite a few technical roadblocks such as the character's shirt not following the rig. I also had some automatic render aborts that I couldn't finish the render past 2% c