Location, location: 500 Word Evaluation

The new brief I was set was called, ‘Location, location’ for this project I had to design, model, texture, light and render a sixty second walkthrough of my chosen location, which is based on a published story or script from a different time period. The interior location had to be set either in a room in a residence or monumental space i.e. church, factory or historical building. I would also have to include all the visual elements such as the furniture and objects that described within the story. The reason behind this project is to design a location, as it is important to support the story and the characters. Whilst undergoing this project it was essential for me to consider the architectural period, genre, dramatic atmosphere and mood, colour and lighting conditions of the location.

For this project I chose, ‘Crooks’ Bunkhouse’ from the book ‘Of Mice and Men’ as the location I would model. The reason I chose this book was because we never learn much from the character himself but we do from the description within the novel and the object’s that can be found. There are many objects within the scene such a hame, an alarm clock, boots and medicine bottles etc. From the description I imagined the room to be made from wooden panels, have an angled roof with dusty light shining through the cracks and the window. I also imagined the room to be quite dark with the objects scattered across the room but neatly placed.

I found this project extremely enjoyable to do as I love making the object’s look realistic to bring the room to life, making it look old, used, cold and lonely. I feel my modeling skills have dramatically improved from the beginning of the last year and the last ‘Still Life’ project helped me to achieve this, making this project seem somewhat easier. Problems that I had last encountered during the last project were ones I wanted to work upon and improve this time, such as the lighting and layout. I feel I have managed to achieve this by adding the volume effect to a directional light, which gives the illusion of dust particles being caught within the lights path. I felt that I managed to create a dark scene that shows what I set out to achieve, which was a ‘lonely, old negro’ who has many possessions.

Overall, I enjoyed this project, I learnt a number of skills but one mistake a did learn from was to always backup your work as early in the project I saved everything directly onto my hard drive and in the end I lost everything and had to restart the project. I feel that this mistake has taught me some valuable lessons but in the end I felt that my second attempt was better than my first, which is something I am proud off. This project will help me with my future career as it has taught me that the atmosphere and design of the room is important as it is vital to support a characters mood, environment and personality. Therefore when I design characters in the future now, I will also think about the environment that they will live in and how the modeling lighting and texturing will affect the way character is portrayed.