Sunset Drive

Sunset Drive

As a compositor, I was always intrigued by vast landscapes and moody lighting in movies and series. So in March, I started this personal project where the goal was to develop my world building, lighting, and compositing skills. In the end, with a lot of patience and looking at different types of references, I got there. I did the procedural environment, texturing, foliage, lighting, and compositing. The ship model was purchased from Digital Shipyard.

Check out the video below!

Inspiration

This short is inspired by chapter 5 of The Book of Boba Fett combined with the Star Wars planet Takodana. The lighting inspiration was mainly from the new batman. I wanted to strike a balance between realism and being a bit stylized. This was sometimes a bit tricky. So I used a lot of different references from cinematography from movies I love. This came down to a lot of cinematography from the DP Greig Fraser.

Foliage

The foliage was a big and important part of this environment. For this, I resorted to the software Speedtree. This was software I'd never used before but always wanted to try. And to my relief, it was pretty intuitive and insanely powerful. I created 7 types of foliage which I scattered over the landscape. It came down to 2 oaks, 2 pines, 2 birches, and a small bush. This provided me with enough variation and kept the performance impact to a minimum.

Breakdown