Telephone Animation - Refining and Lighting

After some final critiques for the telephone animation I rendered it out for the submission today. The last major change I made to the animation was reducing the head movement after the second take on the phone. This allows the audience to focus more on the character's eye darts. I think it's clearer to the audience this way as it shows him processing the information that is being told to him through the phone.

Once the animation was finalised I started to work on the lighting and renders. To help with the lighting setup I looked at how live action films are traditionally lit and found some useful information:

Lighting

3 Types of Lighting used during 20th Century film making:

• Classical - Hollywood system during the 1930's.
• Baroque or Theatrical - Extreme lighting focused on emotions
• Modern - 1960's onwards, using existing sources of lighting and then emphasisng them with more lights.
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In truth film making today uses a mix of all the 3 above lighting methods

Due to the simple nature of my animation exercises I decided to emulate the classical lighting of 1930's Hollywood which focuses on lighting the actor and his face as best as possible.

The basic lighting setup for this system can be seen in the diagram below:

The key light's role is to duplicate the sun and provide the main source of light. It is generally 40 ° from the camera and angled down on the subject.

The fill light's role is to fill in the shadows created by the key light. It makes sure the shadows aren't too dark.

The back light's role is to separate the subject from the background. They tend to be above the subject to create a rim around the subject's outline. The background is usually lit separately.


Ratio of Key Light to Fill Light:

Generally the key light is three times as strong as the fill light but can vary greatly depending on the film and the emotion. i.e. Film noir generally has a ratio of 9:1

With all this in mind I began to set up my lights in Maya.

Lights in Maya

At Hertfordshire we're fortunate enough to have access to Arnold and the world's first Arnold renderfarm at an educational institute. So I used Arnold for my renders.

Firstly I created a curved background that acted as the floor and the wall. It's curved to get a nice gradient from the lights.

I then created 4 ai Area lights and set them up similar to the lighting diagram above. Notice the large light at the top to illuminate the background. (Also notice how I haven't really placed the key light correctly. It should be angled downwards more on the rig...)

I then played around with the exposures of the lights until I had the desired effect. Begin with the key light first and then light the rest. The result is below. Quite a nice looking render! All from simple area lights and a bit of Hollywood knowledge.

And the final rendered out sequence below:

Telephone Dialogue - Render from James Saunders on Vimeo.

I hope some of this information was useful. The next step is to play around and see what different moods can be achieved by messing with the strengths, colours and angles of the lights.