Experimental Research- Lighting
A big part of my idea, visually, revolves around light. The main sequence of the animation will take place inside of a cave, and this cave will be lit by a fire. This already means that I will have to animate the light because fire is constantly moving and changing (Interestingly I found this was a good metaphor for the idea of ancient art, constantly changing and evolving as then, art would've been all experimental. Also fire symbolises passion which is strongly related to the practice of art). This will make it difficult to get the right feel and effect, however it also means that still scenes (where there is no character animation) can still feel alive and moving because the flickering light will keep the scene moving. A big inspiration for this project is the film "Brother Bear" one of my all time favourite animated feature films, and it includes exactly this scene right at the very beginning. An Inuit man, telling a story, strikes up a fire and lights up the surrounding area. Take a look.
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Studying this sequence, I notice there is a lot more going on there than you would initially think. I know that my sequences wont be as grand as these ones, however I can take a lot to learn from them. The way the shadows act, the way the fire flickers and the deep orange hue. These are clearly important things when animating fire. What I want is to find a simple way of creating an impactful lighting effect.
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As you can see, in this one image you can see a strong orange hue all over the scene. Already this indicates whats known as "soft" light.
Not overly saturated but very warm.
As he is facing the light his skin is almost entirely orange.
Around this area of the scene when I watch it, there is a very very subtle "fuzz" effect that the shadows have. Like a wave, the shadow advances and retreats.
In this scene, the character moves a lot, and so the subtlety of the flickering compliments that. If the shadows and light was moving to much while the man was moving, I'm sure the scene would appear "Over Animated". However, for some of my scenes I plan to have the man not even move in some frames. This means to keep the scene animated, I'm sure the light will need to be more obvious.
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As part of an experiment for this, I decided to digitally paint a simple scene (this will not be the final design or composition) and used a "soft light" layer effect that has changing intensities. Here is a video of this that I made.
As you can tell this is an early attempt at recreating the effect. Simply what I have here is a two layers of soft light, both at different intensities, strobe between each other using the timeline. Both of these layers are shown for three frames between changing to the next light. This gives the flickering effect of the light however I do notice that I need to have the shadows moving as well. I found that changing the light frame any quicker than on threes made the strobe a bit too off putting. Also the intensities in light are so minimally different because switching between two that were very different made it an unbearable amount of strobe. Here is another example with the light on twos and a bigger difference in light intensity.
I realised very quickly with this attempt that firstly; it was far too intense. So that's where I toned down the difference between light dramatically. And even after that it seemed to quick. When I made the light flicker on 4's, it was far too slow, but threes seemed to hit the perfect spot. So I will be animating the light on threes. Hopefully that will be the same for the shadows.