KISHAN THAKRAR

Evaluation - Unit 4

I chose the topic 'Water' for this unit. I knew this was a very open question and I made the most of the freedom given to me by exploring different techniques and approaches to the topic. I began by looking at photographers who captured underwater images; Phoebe Rudomino and Mark Mawson. This was the first time I had attempted underwater photography and I soon discovered the many challenges underwater photographers face. I created a response to their work, imitating their image composition, lighting and editing. After a trip to Edinburgh I found inspiration from capturing images by the sea, and of water from above the surface. My favourite images I had taken were from the train on the journey to Edinburgh, as we passed the coast. This lead me on to research landscape photographer Galen Rowell. His landscape photos influenced my photoshoot in portugal at a nature reserve, where I was able to bring to life images of water and nature that were dull as just raw images.

I have in the past used Cinema 4D to create 3D animations, and I wanted to explore creating and capturing water in this way, because I had seen many clips on YouTube of water-related animations. I created a small test animation of water with floating text in it, and I learned a lot of techniques and was able to familiarise myself with them during the process. I was happy with the outcome, so I decided to further explore CG water animation. I looked at a scene from 'Tangled' of lanterns floating above water, which inspired me to create a similar scene of my own, focussing on the water reflections. I learned a lot of techniques here, experimenting with wave sizes, speeds and shapes. I also learned a lot about texturing water and how the software uses real physics (e.g. Refractive index) to simulate various textures and motions. I also wanted to try out creating water droplets, and created a scene where a droplet falls off a leaf, which is then superimposed onto a background image I took. This involved multiple high end software packages including Cinema 4D, Realflow and Adobe After Effects.

For my final piece I created a minute-long CGI animation based on water. I used the aforementioned scenes I had animated, and created a storyboard around this. It begins with the water droplet scene that falls into a cup of water, which is poured down a sink and travels down a drain and flows through all sorts of pipes and systems before reaching the sea, where the lanterns float into the sky. I used lots of different physics simulations and used software called Realflow to simulate the particles and water bodies. I had not used this software before so I taught myself how to use it through software tutorials. Fortunately it worked seamlessy with Cinema 4D where I could further animate and export the projects. One downside was the render time; it would take 30 hours to render a 10 second animation (on average), which meant I was limited to how much actual animation I could render to a sufficient quality, however I felt that I retained a good enough render quality whilst balancing a good length of total animation time. If I had the time, I would have created more scenes perhaps, and rendered at higher qualities, however I was pleased with the overall outcome, especially because I used techniques and certain software for the first time. I also realised I would not be able to match the standard of some of the studios I looked at, simply because I did not have the hardware to do so.

I felt that the entire project made me appreciate water-related photography more, especially with the underwater photos, realising how much work is required to capture photos underwater compared to above the surface. I also learned invaluable photoshop techniques for landscape photography such as HDR effects and adjusting colours in certain ways. I was inspired by the photographers who do not need to edit their photos as much due to their manual camera settings being set with good taste. I have also learned a lot about particle animation and simulation regarding water bodies in a computer generated environment, overcoming many issues regarding the physics of the simulation, because of the fact I created a large variety of water animation scenes, from small droplets to an entire sea of particles.