A Tribute to Castle in the Sky

Since I was a child, I have been fascinated by the Castle in the Sky universe. The story of Sheeta, Pazu and this mysterious world, hidden high up in the sky. At the beginning of the fourth semester, I was able to make the dream of dealing with this story more closely come true. My homage shows glimpses of the island of Laputa, which I deliberately depicted without the human characters in order to convey the feeling of really being on the island and experiencing it. You discover some key scenes and get a sense of both the long-forgotten outside world and the mysterious inside.

I worked with the wonderful sound designer Jürgen Branz to bring this project to life and to give it as much detail and love as possible. The goal was to support the single scenes with harmonic and mysterious sounds.

My focus was on lighting and shading. I wanted to create a dreamy look, which on the one hand contains my own style but on the other hand still contains the style of the actual film a little bit. For all the scenes I asked myself what makes them special? What stands out in the scenes? Where is the focal point and what makes you look there first. With these thoughts in mind, I created scene after scene, and it was important to me to keep comparing all the pieces so that the look remained consistent. 

To collect as much information and important points as possible. I packed all the important stuff into a program called PureRef. There I also followed the storyboard and compared all the styleframes again and again and made notes.
 
I also set myself the task of learning ZBrush and Substance Painter as part of the project. So many parts of the project were created in these programs, with the composition then being done in Cinema4D along with Redshift. For example, I first created the blockout of the robot in Cinema to then sculpt details in ZBrush. After that, the UV map was created in RizomUV, and then the textures were created in Substance Painter. 

Since sound is a vital part of a film, I worked very closely with my sound designer Jürgen Branz. We wanted to support and enhance the visual points of the film with associated sounds. The idea was to convey a feeling of how it feels on the island to experience exactly these things of the scenes shown. 

Below you can see part of my process and how the project came to be.

To work with the original fonts and symbols from the movie, I used Adobe Illustrator to carefully trace them so I can get them into the 3D programs:

Here are to examples of models where I have made the blockout in Cinema to sculpt details in ZBrush and then texture in Substance Painter:

First mood of my favorite scene: