Harbor Collaboration Week 1

SANM560 Winter Quarter 2023

For week one we got assigned to our groups. My group was Team Amethyst, and I'll be working with Maria Hormaza, Qinye Xiang, and Ethan Nasiff. I'll be doing FX with Maria, Qinye will be compositing, and Ethan will be lighting.

Our assignment is to make an advertisement. We got to ideation right away. We thought about doing procedural Lego houses, make up, a Roomba, and a speaker for our ad.

I made a couple quick sketches of potential videos to do with the Lego houses, but eventually we decided to go with the speaker idea because it would be good to make FX for, and it would be able to be composited into a live plate so that Qinye can have something substantial to do that aligns with what she wants for her portfolio, instead of just doing compositing for pure CG.

When we decided on the idea of doing a speaker, we chose to go with the JBL portable speakers. I did a quick mock up for a 3D previs so we could have at least something to work off of while we thought of our final product. I also did some fast sketches for color concepts so that we could figure out when we want what effect to show up. Maria and I talked about what effects we would like, and we said that we wanted a particle soundwave effect, and some beads bouncing in the subwoofer.

We wanted the main colors to be black and orange. Black because we noticed that a lot of advertisements for tech products use black to show the modernity of their product, and we chose orange because JBL tends to use lots of orange for their products.

Once we discussed some more, we decided to focus mainly on the soundwave and bead effects, and add more if we had the time. Qinye then did another, more refined 3D previs which we used more heavily in our ideation going forward. When we changed the previs, I went ahead and redid the colored concepts to make it fit better with the new video.

Here are the reference videos that we collected to use in the speaker advertisement.