"Oh My Boat!" - Master Lighting

"Oh My Boat!" - Master Lighting

I'm using this post as an opportunity to share how I manage the Lighting for the short movie: "Oh My Boat!". This movie was made in 6 weeks within a team of 7 during my 3rd Year at ESMA Lyon.

You can find our short movie at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zqKlodjCuo

Lighting wise, The challenge here was to light a sequence shot where we had to manage both inside and outside exposure. We also had to think about camera focus and light exposure in order to highlight our characters. 

FINAL SHOTS

Here a quick look at our final shots. I'm showcasing here the difference of lighting exposure and focus management in our short movie. We had to manage this whole process in Compositing depending which character we wanted to highlight.

The last shot is a backlighting in which we tried to keep a certain consistancy regarding the whole sequence.

THE PROCESS

We first decided to decompose everything for optimisation and compositing reasons. Which means that we rendered separately our sequence shot. The main passes were: The Outside, The Inside (cabin), Owen (1st character) and Molly (2nd character).

LIGHTRIGS

To shot our sequence shot we created three LightRigs. The main one was used for our whole shot and was mainly composed of our KeyLight: THE SUN (=distant light). The second one was mainly used to light everything in the inside of the cabin and the third one was created to manage our Backlighting.

LIGHTRIG_002: INSIDE OF THE CABIN

The trickiest part for us was the lighting of the character of the inside of the cabin. We had to add several practical and dramatic lights in order to highlight him (regarding lighting vocabulary I'm mainly use the documentation made by Chris Brejon: https://chrisbrejon.com/).  For example we used bounce lights to create effects such as the reflection of the ocean but also the reflection of the cabin wood on the character. 

Cabin final lighting + showcasing some of the lights used: sun light (key), fill light, bounce lights

Character final lighting + showcasing some of the lights used: fill light, rim light, kick light fill light 

Final inside lighting (no compositing effect added)

LIGHTRIG_003: BACKLIGHTING

For our Backlighting shot we tried to keep it as simple as we could. Here, for the whale a total amount of three lights were used. Our key light is still the sun and we had two fill lights, in which one was used to enhance the water reflection effect on the whale.

COMPOSITING

Compositing played a huge role in the making of our final shot. We had a bunch of effects to enhance the quality of the lighting our sequence movie. Here, a few examples of what we had: animated lens flare, light wrap, grading, vignette, etc.

MANAGING FOCUS AND LIGHT EXPOSURE

In order to highlight one or another character at different moment in our sequence shot, characters that are not at the same location in our stage scale, we had to manage the focus and light exposure. The easiest and cheapest way to adjust and create such an effect was for us, to manage it in compositing. 

Our tools allowed us to manage our light exposures and depth of field amount by simply placing animation keys where we needed a change of focus. By having all of them regrouped in the same tool (gizmo), we've been able to manage it properly by having an overview of the whole sequence.

OUR TOOLS:

EXAMPLE:  Focus on the outside VS focus on the inside