Inside Shop Scene

This is the scene that directly comes after the establishing shots of outside the corner shop. This was the most important scene for setting up the whole story.

Plan

The scene is broken into three parts

• Establishing shots of inside the shop
• Establishing love connection between the cans
• Can being brought and separated from each other

Below is the images from my Previs.

I actually quite like the composition of the scene. I wanted more establishing shots though to make it look like a bit of a manky corner shop

I also did an animation in Maya of a water drop going into a bucket and wanted to recreate something like that.

Modelling

Here is a video of a series of screen recordings of myself modelling objects for the shop scene. I modelled everything in the scene bar one object which was the cardboard boxes. I was really proud as alot of it was my experimenting and figuring it out as I went along.

I reference to create the milk bottles and chocolate bars etc. The basic shapes were cylinder and cubes.

I used loads of references to create the the shelves. I did the holes by subdividing the plane and using Loop tools.

I used the array modifier to duplicate the shelves.

I used this as a reference to create the fridge. I brought it into the scene and used it to give better proportions than I would have if I had done it without. I also collected lot of picks of inside fridges to model that.

For the surroundings of the shop, I used a Cube and separated it into walls, floor and ceiling.

I used a noise texture to created a terrazzo flooring. I also used loop cuts to make it looked tiled. I did the same to the ceiling to make it look tiled and then also add a popcorn looking effect on the ceiling.

The cereal and cans were just cubes and cylinders.

Texture Atlas

I wanted to have fake brands on the boxes but didn’t have time to create them. So I got the idea to use AI to create a texture atlas of different cereal. I found this tutorial below that helped me map the texture onto the objects.

Character animation

This was the blocking stage, the first pass at animating the scene. I wanted the the Vincent rig to re stock the fridge so it was the first time the cans met. This was different from the previs but I thought it would be better for the story.

I started by recording reference of myself picking up a “crate” of cans. There were several reference videos.

Each week I did a another pass at the animation, from blocking, I went to blocking plus. Then when I was happy I splined it.

I found the character animation part incredibly hard. There were a lot of timing issues, I kept animating it too fast!!!

So I would grab key frames and drag it along to correct it.

I also had a lot of difficulty with the changing between IK and FK and having a constraint with the hands and the box. little movements meant the difference between the rigs arms being normal and just randomly shooting up into the air. It just took alot of time an patience in the end, as for once, I couldn’t find an answer to the problems I was having with Blender. I think the modelling part in Blender was amazing but the character animation proved far more difficult in Blender for me.

There is still timing issues, something that I would like to fix in the future.

For the animation of Rain, the other rig, I actually went backwards and forwards between Blocked and Spline. I’m not sure why but it made it a bit easy and the rig was also SO much easier to use than the Vincent rig

Camera and Light Animations

I wanted to get across that the cans were falling in love so it was all in the camera animations. I had a lot of panning shots so it looked like the cans were looking at each other. I used quite a few different cameras for the fridge shot along, and switch between them to make it as personified as possible. I knew in After Effects I wanted to add in a vignette and pink tones to manufacture a romance.

Some extra things I thought of to enhance the romance was to change the aspect of the screen. When the camera starts to zoom into the can, I changed the aspect ratio from 16:9, which is how the film began, to 2560×1080 which is 21:9 ultrawide display. I thought it looked more cinematic and made it really emphasise the change in mood.

Lastly, I had modelled a light inside the fridge so to enhance the colour that I knew I would add in post, in After Effect, I just animated the colour of the lights inside the fridge.

Final Thought and Final Renders

I was quite happy with the final look. But there was a few issues with the render. I had issues rendering on the render farm as per. The rigs were not compatible with an old version of Blender. So I had to render on Blender 3.5 on render farm, but it meant that the texture issues arose. The mistiness in the fridge was different floors etc. I like the overall look but I think because there were issues rendering I didn’t have time to render out Vincent picking up the cans. I wanted to add it in later. I also didn’t realise until I had rendered it, that the other rig, Rain, the animation for that was really jolty from inside the fridge. It wasn’t evident on the test renders because the fridge wasn’t as transparent on Eevee compared to the Cycles render engine.

I also wanted the can to look like it was crying, but the water droplet addon didn’t work properly with Render farm. Plus I didn’t have time to render it out on the computer.

I also wanted to add more things in the scene but it was being so heavy for my computer.

For the future, I would love to keep working on my character animation and re-render with more objects in the scene and the water drop working. I think without the water droplets, there is something missing for me unfortunately.