ARD 510 Production Design: December 2013

I knew the shape I wanted for my set, so that was my first step; drawing the room:

My next objective was to introduce the pillars, but first I had to design some modern, decorative ones. I wanted to use blue LED lights within the grooves of them, but a white pillar wouldn't really emphasize the blue light, so I decided to go for black marble. I was immediately satisfied with how it looked:

When building this; I drew a semi-circle on the floor and use the push/pull tool to erect it. There are no perfect circles in SketchUp unless you use the smooth tool, but this worked to my advantage as I could push/pull every other face on the object to give it the blue neon grooves.

Once I had built one pillar, I began to think about how I could make them obviously decorative, rather than it look like it is supporting the structure of the office. The idea I had and finally went with was to not make them stretch from roof to ceiling, and this is my end result for that idea, which I was very pleased with:

Next; I began thinking about the fish tank I was going to add. How big will it be? What colour glass should I use? etc. My original plan was to make it like it is in "We're the Millers" and let it take up the whole back wall, but completely by accident I drew a line stretching from right the way around the room which I ended up liking even more! The way I pictured it now was a panoramic tank.

Once I had textured the glass of the tank on, I realized it looked quite bland within it, but I couldn't quite put my finger on how exactly I could add more life to it without using marine life (just yet). I tried researching sea wrecks but it didn't quite look right, but then I came across "Atlantis" which is a legendary fallen empire that lies under water. I researched many pictures of Atlantis and they all had Roman Pillars in them, which is perfect for this set, so I downloaded some photos of Atlantis and stuck them to the inner walls of the tank, and it suited it perfectly:

*I do not own these images, artists unknown*

All was going smoothly until I tried to add a photo to the curved wall. SketchUp is not capable of wrapping images to curved surfaces, so the next step was to overcome this problem whilst still keeping the curved wall. I tried many different methods, and my most hopeful one was to make the photo into a texture which I could then use the bucket tool to add it to a surface:

-- However; like I mentioned earlier when drawing the pillar, no circles are complete circles, they are built up of polygonal surfaces, which caused my Atlantis paint texture to look like this:

As you can see, it becomes unevenly distributed across the surface, and no matter how hard I tried to tweak it, it still didn't look right. My next question was "How can I keep the curved wall but make the picture solid?" and the answer was simple; Extend the building backwards so the inner back wall of the tank was flat, but the rear office wall was still curved, and this was the result:

*The artwork belongs to Andreas Rocha*

*http://www.blogger.com/profile/12712480730128802681*

When viewing the model from the angle that the image just above is displaying; I had an idea of putting some sort of glass dome on top of it, but there isn't a tool for making domes, so this proved to be a bit tricky.

I only need half a dome for just above the curved wall, so to do this, I made a 2D semi-circle with an arch in the middle:

Once I achieved this shape, it proved difficult to make shape it to be half of a dome, but after looking at SketchUp Tutorials; I discovered the "Follow Me" tool, which lets you click and drag shapes around bends and curves. This is how the dome began to look after this process.

To hollow out the dome; I had to use the offset tool to draw around the inside of the dome.

Finally, to make it glass, I used the bucket tool to make it translucent and put it atop my model.

Now for the interior design! I wanted to make this more modern than the original, yet have the same sort of feel to it. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I watched a film called "We're the Millers" which inspired me to have a fish tank, but then I thought more a long the lines of the lights I had in the pillars and decided to incorporate that with the rest of the room.

I began to look at the film "Tron Legacy" as that uses lots of neon lights, especially when bordering objects. I made a mood board from pictures I gathered from it:

As you can see, a lot of the lights are very symmetrical and patterned, which is a lot like how I would like my set to be.

I added lights to different parts of my set, as these pictures show:

Now to start putting in some furniture. I wanted to revamp Saul's desk to be this ridiculously over the top modern desk, which also followed suit of the lights within the room. I began drawing a box shaped desk, but I then though it didn't really stand out among the the other objects in the room, so I tried making a curved desk:

Even when I made it as curved as I could; it still looked boxy and jagged, so to make it more spherical, I used the soften and smooth edges tool, and the before and after photos below show how well it turned out:

Before

After

Another touch I wanted to add to the room was the justice scales. I have placed some on Saul's desk, but I want to intertwine the symbol of the scales with something else in Saul's original office, to which I thought; "We the People" from his back wall.

*Copyright Free Image*

I first cut around this image in Photoshop, and then used the path to cut the same shape out of a blue marble texture:

Once I did this, the next step was to get a floor texture. I wanted to get a mosaic tile look for the floor to fit with Saul's original roman theme. These next few images describe how I reached this target.

I first eliminated the saturation of sandstone texture to make the colour dark. To get the individual mosaic tiles; I used the mosaic texturizer tool in Photoshop to make the pattern feel more organic and natural, yet still uniform

This texture without the scales became the texture for the floor throughout the set. Normally this would require to be offset to avoid repetition, but when I applied the texture; repetition wasn't present!

Finally I incorporated the words "We the People" around it and also made the scales and the letters mosaic to match the dark mosaic tiles.

Once the flooring had been done, the set began to look almost complete. All that was left was a matter of dressing the set with props and lighting it:

Within the original office, there are many props that are referred to throughout the show, and two of the main ones are:

- Saul's Safe

- Saul's many disposable mobile phones.

I've stayed true to these props and included them in my set. The mobile phones are located within Saul's top right draw, as you can see here in x-ray view:

I've also included a gun in the top right draw as well because in my interpretation of "Breaking Bad"; Saul needs to protect himself, even when he has body guards! Another few props I added were the files of Saul's main priorities "under the gun" and next to him at all times:

The safe in his office is hidden away by movable Roman pillars in the original, but as in this universe; Saul is proud of what he does, he has his safe on display for everyone to see, and within it are hundreds of thousands of dollars:

Normal View

X-Ray View

For the final part; lighting; I was originally going to import my SketchUp file into Maya, but when I did this; it took out all textures I had originally placed on my model in SketchUp. Now as I had come this far while painting the model, I did not want to start from scratch. So I searched for an alternative option to light it. Not long after my incident with Maya; a student on my course suggested a SketchUp plugin called "LightUp". Some members of the group had tried this plug in and it worked really well, but I didn't have as much joy in my model, as the pictures below show:

Before it actually did anything to my model; this screen occurred many times: the dreaded "Not Responding" screen.

When it finally did work, no matter how much I would tweak the controls; it would all appear far too over exposed and do strange things to the surfaces.

Here we can see that it beheaded my main character, which isn't what I was aiming for at all!

The shark was originally grey... No matter how hard I tried to find out why LightUp did this; I couldn't figure out why.

Just as I thought I had run out of luck with options to light my set, my lecturer told me that by taking screenshots of my set in places where I wanted to light it and used Photoshop to show what I was aiming for, I wouldn't be at a disadvantage. So I did just that!

Before Photoshop

After Photoshop! This is as close to how I wanted it to look as I could get. I like the ambient, soft neon glows in the grooves of the pillars and the metal. When it would be recording; the beams of light would be slowly dimming and brightening.

Here we have Saul's desk before and Photoshopping was done...

And here's what it looks like after! Almost like a swimming pool being lit at night, to match the fish tank.

And there we have it! Saul's newly designed set is complete!

There is one camera man on the show who films in sets like this. It would be very rare to find two camera men in a small environment. From watching the show, the most traditionally used shot in Saul's office is where I have placed the model cameraman:

ARD 510 Production Design

Wednesday, 18 December 2013

Sketchup References

Thursday, 5 December 2013

Building the Final Design

Monday, 2 December 2013

Research in Harry Potter Studios