MARINA SALAS
Lighting & Compositing Artist
My Work:
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Writter
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Lighting
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Compositing
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Concept
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Environment
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Animation
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Effects
Softwares used:
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Autodesk Maya
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Arnold
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Nuke
With the advances of science and technology, it is normal that have various moral and ethical dilemmas . The history of Genethic explores a future where the advancement of cience has reached an unimaginable level. Our main character is an expert in genetics. After merging With a military creature is forced to continue his experiments isolated from society.
Genethic is a two-year project which I have been lucky to form part. We joined a group of eleven people with very different profiles but with a common goal; give our best to get a visually amazing movie piece. Our team name is "The third lab", because in this classroom the story of Genethic was born. The road was not easy there were a lot of brainstorming and everyone always had something to say. We decided to focus on looking for a simple and shocking idea that we could explain in 1 minute. One day one of the members of the group, came up with a new idea that mixed various concepts that we had been talking about over the weeks.
This has been so far the project which I have dedicated more time and diopters. Luckily I counted with an amazing team of artists that has become part of my family.
Sergi Solanes, Cristian Casas, Silvia Ros, Laia Cuffi, Laia Batlle, Felix Tejedor, Sergi Ferrà, Irene Garcia, Joan Valdivielso, Gerard Grifell and our supervisor Sancho Albano.
In this section I will explain the lighting of GENETHIC. We were 4 lighters, Sergi Solanes, Silvia Ros, Cristian Casas and me. I will explain how we organized the shots to have continuity between them. Below I will explain the shots I have worked on and the difficulties that I had to face.
First of all we started by analyzing our short film of 22 shots. We divided it into 9 sequences. Each lighter would do a masterlighting to define the mood and then we would split the production shots to had more styles on our reels.
The first thing we did was assign the time of day. It would start in the afternoon and the final shot would be a sunset. We started looking for all the references.
In this section I will focus on explaining how I did the Masterlighting of the cave. My work was to set the mood of the sequence so it has continuity for all the people on the team.
I was really excited to do this sequence, as in the pre-production we had been inspired by a scene from "Lady and the Tramp 2" (one of my favorite movies as a child.
One of the main challenges we had in this masterlighting was the number of polygons. The cave sequence is the biggest scene we had to face . To do the masterlighting we needed to have all the shots in one scene to be able to see through other cameras. We chose to export the set dressings of each shot as standins and put them together in the masterlighting scene. This way we solve all the memorie problems
This lighting had to be magical and more intimate. We wanted to get very natural lighting to transmit the calm before the storm. The main references we had to do this masterlighting were this:
The key light in this masterlighting was the fireflies. We did different tests to make the swarm. We tried with a maya mash but the results we got didn't convince us. After a lot of test we decided to do them with Houdini, since we had much more control. Basically you took a plane, put noise on it to distort it and made each light follow a vertex.
Once we had the fireflies seated up we started with the lighting. It was very interesting to do this masterlighting and at the same time very complicated. It was such a big scene so when the lights looked good in one shot in others they didn't. I think that thanks to this I have improved my lighting workflow. I have seen that you have to start by making a base lighting with the minimum number of lights. Below you can see the images with the finished Masterlighting. My colleagues improved later the production shots.
With the masterlighting done I could start my production shot. The main problem I had was that the fireflies needed to have a lot more presence and light up the whole scene. In addition, since the creature was seen very closely, we have to play more with the reflections of the eye . To do that I take the animation of the fireflies and enlarged for the layer of the eyes
Evolution of the shot thanks to the feedback of Sancho Albano: