'Coraline' Pink Palace - DMP Recreation

To practice my fundamental DMP skills, I decided to recreate and change aspects of a shot from one of my favorite films, Coraline, by Laika Studios. This was quite a challenge, but since I worked on this during an internship at Resin (VFX studio in Adelaide), I was able to keep motivated and learn some handy tricks along the way.

After matching the perspective and camera move as best as I could, I began modeling and texturing the Pink Palace. Luckily for me, I was able to find a lot of reference from Lakia's social media posts and in the film.  

The most difficult aspect of the shot was the lighting. I worked on this for a while before realizing that light acts differently when on a miniature model. I found that matching the lighting from the film wasn't going to be the best option, so I attempted to make an interesting morning sort of look with the sun hitting the top of the house.

The next step after rendering out the CG sequence was working on a background in Photoshop. I decided to not do as much atmospheric work in this stage because I wanted to practice it in Nuke.

This project ended up having a lot of spice thrown on top of it in Nuke. I was shown a few compositing tricks during my time at Resin so I wanted to see how far I could push things during this stage. I also added quite a few more cloud/atmosphere elements to bring the background together.