Film room project, choosing a room.

Our second project of the year briefed us to recreate as accurately as possible an iconic room from any film or TV series of our choice. Even with a group of four this was an extremely challenging project and had to be completed in three weeks. I can honestly say that in the last four weeks I've already spent more time in the universities labs than I ever did during the whole of last year.

So far, I'm feeling much better about the course and the new course structure this year as opposed to last year. It makes me much happier that there's no longer numerous unrelated and overlapping projects from the different modules. Instead, the visual design and game production modules now seem to interrelate and work seamlessly together. Overall, the course feels a lot more refined and gives you a lot of time for each project. Because of this, I'm personally feeling more motivation to work much harder on each individual project and have it looking the best I can make it, as opposed to juggling time and quality between projects like last year.

To begin our project, we started out by creating mood boards of shots from all of our favourite films or television series with rooms that we'd like to recreate. Here's one of mine-

GoT- The Eyrie

   
At first, we all agreed as a group that the Eyrie's throne room would be an awesome choice. We all love Game of Thrones, and felt pretty excited about the idea of re-creating this room. This was our first mistake. The focus of the project was on colour, lighting and mood. Even though Game of Thrones has a lot of that, we'd basically chosen this room almost entirely on the basis that we enjoyed game of thrones and the fantasy genre, as opposed to considering other factors of the project. In order to progress, we had to distance ourselves from the films/series and any personal attachment we had to them, and consider the individual shots for what they were in terms of colour, light and composition.

Our tutors definitely thought we had chosen something cliché, and encouraged us to choose another film. Max, a member of our team, put together another mood-board with a lot of variety.

Max's moodboard

Gathering other opinions from peers and tutors we found that the shots from Pixar movies were a particularly popular choice. This led to us finding and deciding upon a particular shot from Toy Story 3 that the team all loved, this decision also had positive responses from tutors during presentation.

Moving out, Toy Story 3

What was cool about the final decision to do Andy's room was that even though we all liked the scene, it was a scene we would probably have never concluded upon by ourselves. There was a lot here that appealed to us, particularly the light of the sun hitting the box and floor, and bouncing to other areas of the room. Also, while the scene appears to be relatively simple if compared to some grittier live action films, there is actually a lot of subtle things going on. The reflectivity of the floor, slight wear and tear on furniture and the darker areas of wallpaper where Andy's posters had been and prevented any bleaching from the sun were all things we were going to have to consider when re-creating this shot.