A new year at university, and a new project begins! This time, the brief is to take a location from a film or tv series, build it in 3D, and use it as a set to create a cinematic.
We were given more or less free reign to choose what we were taking the set from; the only restriction was that the original show had to be cinematic and identifiable, rather than something like a sitcom. This was done to make sure our original material was interesting and would have good lighting references for the cinematic: trying to build a to scale set of Sheldon's apartment in The Big Bang Theory, for example; while identifiable, it has the exact same lighting for the entirety of the show, and the set was not built to create an atmosphere in itself, but instead to serve as a vessel for the actors.
I had a think about sets that I had seen in films or shows that stood out to me, and I settled on the plastic prison cell from X-Men. For those that don't know, one of the main antagonists of the X-Men is Magneto, a man with power over metal: to prepare for his potential imprisonment, the government commissioned the creation of a detainment centre built of plastic and glass, suspended over a chasm and buried deep underground. As you might expect, such a prison didn't hold him forever, but it worked for a time, and it looked pretty cool.
I made a reference board for the prison: mainly I built it out of stills from the film, but I did manage to find a cool piece of concept art by Mark Goerner.
[1][2]
I'm quite liking the look of this set! It's going to be a challenge for me because I'm not used to working with assets that are essentially no opacity, and making the lighting and shadows interact properly with all of the assets is going to take me a while. The build itself is not too complex: that's one of the reasons I like it, in fact. The cell looks sci-fi and restrictive without being overly complicated and out of this world.
Let's get to it!
[1] Mark Goerner's concept art piece for X2: X-Men United. (http://www.grnr.com/)
[2]Stills from X2: X-Men United, by Marvel Studios, directed by Bryan Singer.
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