How Will This Work?
One of my clients received a drawing from his scenic designer, for a reasonably lavish proposal for a fashion show. My client asked me to translate the drawing into a previsualization, or previz, that he could pitch to the executives that would make the decision about spending the money.
The basic set was straightforward enough, but the single drawing that we had was somewhat static. We needed to demonstrate the workings of a biggish array of video displays that could travel left and right, as well as up and downstage, not to mention fly up and down. They could do any or all of these things at once.
We started with this drawing and a basic platforming model, created by another designer. My client felt that we needed a bit more, to help his client understand the proposal, and be eager to invest the money to create it. That's where I entered the picture.
To help keep my client's costs down, I suggested a series of still images, morphing from one to the next, to form a simple stop-motion previz animation. That way, we wouldn't have to animate a model, but we could still convey a sense of the movement of the screens and their overhead support trolley rig.
...then once we had all the necessary geometry in place, I lit and textured the model.
Also, I whipped up some graphics to suggest iMag and speaker support video on the screen array. Nobody likes blank screens, yes?
We chose some views, and then I arranged the screens, overhead trolley rigging, scale figure and lighting for each view and started rendering...
...a total of seven views. After a little post-processing, I then exported those renderings to video editing software, & edited them to create the finished previz animation, presented here in a small (reasonably), web-friendly format:
Paying close heed to the original designer's intent, I modeled everything except the few existing platforms. I worked up the basic model geometry...
