My first step was to model the camera using a photo from the internet. I went about this by creating the basic block shapes and then editing the geometry and adding bevels where necessary. To create the white part I was expecting to just extrude a face from one cube to create an L shape and then bevel the vertex that joined them, but this didn’t work as you can see in the video. To work around it I instead drew a custom spline and extruded it to get the right shape. Everything else though was pretty much straight forward.
When creating the texture for the flash of the camera, I experimented with some of the presets in C4D, but none of them gave the effect that I wanted, so I went into photoshop and created my own. I created the basic stripes and then blurred them. Creating it in Photoshop meant that I could use what I had created as the texture for the colour channel, but also plug it into the normal layer, to give the effect of raised bars in the flash part. This is the first time I have created a custom material like this in Photoshop, but it was actually quite easy and I would be willing to do it again if I ever needed any more specific materials.
Initially, I wanted to add soft-body physics to the photo and have it slide out of the camera on its own because of the gravity of the scene. I soon learned that this wasn’t going to happen when I simulated it and the photo exploded. I decided that instead, I would use the spline warp tool to fake the motion instead. I drew the spline as the path that the photo would take if it came out of the camera, and then keyframed it along the path. This still gives a pretty believable motion, however, it would be a bit better if I did some research into cloth physics and maybe added a cloth modifier.
I want this piece to demonstrate the skills I have learned in manipulating light, so the flash is a key aspect of it. My idea was to have a large square light inside the flash, however light sources as far as I can tell can only be from a single point, rather than a large surface, so I had to work around this. I created one light source with a very bright visible light that flashes on, just after the button gets pressed. In this clip, I also sorted out all of the keyframing and added a camera into the composition to finalise everything before my export.
This is the final piece. I am actually really proud of this, I feel like it is successful in demonstrating my light manipulation skills, but maybe I could make the flash a little faster to be more realistic. Something I could’ve considered would be to research the duration of actual camera flashes. From just a quick Google search, I have found that the duration of a flash, at the slowest starts from around 1/300th of a second (Harmer, 2017), while mine is two frames in my 30fps clip, so approximately 1/15th of a second.
When I do my final render for this piece I will change the flash duration to make it more accurate. I also think that I will maybe add some kind of platform for the camera to be on so that it’s not floating in the air. This way it will match my other pieces more, but I need to keep in mind somewhere for the photo to float away to so that the animation can loop easily.
After my main export, I decided to change the colour of the camera’s main body. I’ve seen that it comes in different colours so I just wanted to have a look at how my piece would look in different colour schemes. I really like the bottom 6, I like how their colours pop, and I think that as a 6 they look great together, and almost a bit pop art-like.
When I noticed the pop art feel to the camera, I decided to experiment with some brightly coloured backgrounds to further delve into the pop art theme. I really like how these look as stills, even though they don’t fit my project’s theme and won’t be part of my final piece.
Finally, at some point, I turned the camera off by accident, and I realised that actually it makes a big difference what lens is used on the camera. On the left is with a standard 80mm portrait lens, and on the right is just rendering through the default viewer. The piece on the left looks significantly more realistic, so in future, I will make sure I render everything though a portrait lens for this project, since its mostly close up ‘product’ shots anyway.
Bibliography
Harmer, J. (2017). Flash Duration of Speedlights: How long is the pop of a flash?. [online] Improve Photography. Available at: https://improvephotography.com/46974/flash-duration-speedlights-long-pop-flash/ [Accessed 23 Nov. 2019].
Jennie Hawkes 