These are from another of our various recently completed projects at Hatch Studios Ltd.
These are a set of fourteen backgrounds created for the agency Ben Simon Burns. They were developed for the new 2006 version of the highly-successful anti-smoking campaign website commissioned by the Government of Ontario.
Each of the rooms were color graded in a specific hue to reflect the mood and atmosphere of the environment.
Credits:
Directed by Richard Rosenman
Exec Produced by Randi Yaffa
Modeling by Joel Mongeon
Texturing, lighting, rendering & compositing by Richard Rosenman
Volumetrics - I always do 'em in seperate layers so that I can colorize them, increase or decrease their luma, and do whatever else I need to. So I just assign everything a white material, setup a standard spotlight with VRay shadows, and add a volume effect to it. The rest is done in comp - in this case PS, since they’re just stills.
Specular Blooms - very simple. Isolate the brightest areas of the image, add a touch of blur, and recomposite back on top using additive.
Color Grading (my favourite part) - I set up the lighting rigs within the color realm I want - ie. blues, or greens, or reds, etc. But your lighting should never be JUST one hue. Lighting always contains a primary color and a secondary fill color and in most cases, they should be opposites - to make the image not appear flat. So for the science lab, the dominating lighting color is cool green, but you have the contrasting lighting of the warm orange sunlight coming from the window. You’ll see this contrast in each render.
After you’ve lit and rendered the scene, an additional color grade is done in PS to ‘unify’ the palette further. So a solid color layer might be composited on top of the final image using one of PS’s various comp modes at a very slight opacity.
One of the most impressive uses of color grading in cinematography was used in “Hero”. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the film is divided into various segments in which a specific color treatment is used - for EVERYTHING - the rooms, the environment, the clothing, the film transfer. The director goes through the entire color spectrum throughout the film and the shots are absolutely incredible. They are perfect in every way possible.
