Catcall

catcall verb /ˈkatˌkôl/ The first use of the 'catcall' is believed to have come from the Shakespearean era where it was used to mock a performer, the audience would shriek and cry like that of a cat.

This then progressed to 'mashers' in 19th century America who were described as 'aggressive male street flirts'.

Thanks to the mentorship with Iván Manuel Benítez Sanz of The Lighting Lab, I have had the perfect guidance to working on my first animated shot. This is a collaboration with Lupin House and animator, Rossana Diez.

Reference

Inspirations:

Night lighting reference:

Composition of scene reference:

Setting the scene

before

after

reference

By utilizing Sarah Tarr's Harlem Streets set and Zootopia as a guide, there are not only better leading lines but also further visual interest and depth making the scene feel less 'crowded.'

Breaking Down the Lights

The character is the 'key' point of most stories. Using ambient, key, fill, and other scene lights draw the focus.

Building Them Back Up

Combining all the above, the character comes to light.

Where Are Lights Placed?

You can see the effects of the lights, but where are they physically?

Shadow Effect

Sometimes something is off and finally it hits you.

I noticed that the headlights of the offscreen car did not cast a shadow of the lamppost. Oh, light linking, how dangerous you can be.

In order to add back in the shadow animation without having to rerender the scene, I added a new render layer for just the lamppost shadow. Then in Nuke merged the shadow matte into the scene. Solved!

v33_r01a_n.v05_r01a Added lamppost shadow animation and flickering light with sound.

Or was it?

This did create an animated shadow based on the the moving car, but now the shadows were a bit distracting and not quite right.

The Fix

There comes a point when fixing fixes just gets messy. To make a cleaner scene, I created more render layers dividing the scene into 3 parts:environment
character
atmosphere

and those into 3 additional parts plus added shadowMattes for each:static
moving car 1
moving car 2

With 12 render layers, am able to make adjustments where needed without the costly render times and properly rerender the lamppost's shadow.

Kill the Darling

So, the darling. Thought it would be pretty cool if the lamplight flickered when Sarah got mad, like her anger possessed power.

By adding an expression in Nuke and keyframes to the small period where she is frustrated, then a little buzzing sound, voila! Flickering.

But as cool as the effect was, it didn't add to the story, so had to kill the flicker.

But hey, I learned a new trick in Nuke that is now in my arsenal of knowledge and it will surely be resuscitated on a future scene!

Compositing

Detail touches such as grading, eye dings, depth of field with bokeh, vignette, chromatic aberration, and reflections were added in Nuke to achieve the final polish.