Post     Production

To create the old Art Deco Palisades Theatre, we shot drone footage of the Tower Theatre in Miami. The following is how we forged the virtual camera.

 

Once the 3D virtual camera was solved and created, we used Cinema 4D to build all the parts needed to bring our fictional Palisades Theater to life. I began my 3D animation career way back in 1997 using 3D Studio DOS (loaded from 14 floppy discs). Over the intervening years, I graduated to 3DS MAX, then when I shifted computer platforms to Mac, I migrated to Cinema 4D. It's been a powerful tool in my motion graphics and VFX arsenal, and I pushed it harder than ever in the production of PICTURE END.

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To start with, I made some rudimentary sketches of what I imagined the Palisades Theatre's spire and marquee would look like. But there was a key requirement to what these elements had to accomplish: they had to obscure the real theatre's existing spire and marquee while seamlessly blending in. Because of the Point Cloud's virtual capture of the Tower Theatre's key structure, I was able to quickly construct basic 3D solid parts that would help me determine exactly where and how big the 3D modeled parts would fit.

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Once I had the rough-in 3D shapes, I began the process of creating the unique art deco parts I imagined would make up the Palisade's structure. Much of what I created was on-the-fly. I modeled whatever I felt would look good at a given location. The spire was really fun to design because when I was young I worked at several movie theaters that had those tall neon surrounded structures. So this meant lots of neon to create. And though I did use some plug-ins to help make the smaller neon signs, I handmade (by computer design) every glass tube, insulator and the neon-filled glow. To make the situation a little more complicated, I had to build two versions of the Palisades Theatre's façade: one for the present day derelict building about to close, and the pristine 1968 version where all the neon and light bulbs were shining vibrantly. Okay, so even back then, I made certain that there were a few of the marquee bulbs burned out. Gotta keep it real. :-)

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The final step in the theatre's modeling was the texturing and shading. We were using Redshift Renderer for our output, so every texture material needed to be Redshift optimized or native. Our friends at Greyscale Gorilla, Siger Shaders, and PixelLabs have abundant pre-designed materials for me to scour. The libraries were extraordinary and diverse, offering exactly the resources I needed to finish out the theatre's look.