How Rude.
Meant to post this on Christmas, I kinda just forgot!
I'll be posting some alts and stuff soon!
Here's the stuff that went into it!
First: The idea.
Today's been a tough year. Left without much of a family, and lacking any sort of group or... Anybody to celebrate the holidays with, I thought I'd reminisce and fantasize about a house party where me and my partner could be ourselves and feel at home.
I instantly thought about cheesy postcards, saturated warm colours, plenty of bokeh blur... You know the look. Cheesy, but it represented everything that I wanted in that moment: a family, a sense of connection, and someone I love. So I took to pinterest for inspiration:
Such lovely lights... I needed some of that, but I kind of wanted to contrast it with slightly gloomier tones, too! Black christmas hats, edgy makeup, dark clothing... Plus a little playfulness. The idea then just became: hazy POV shot of walking in on us kissing on Christmas.
First I needed the background:
It's all done in blender! It's nothing too fancy all things considered but it does look somewhat cozy! I've made nicer backgrounds in Maya before but I'm still not very used to Blender and the strange "filmic" pipeline.
After that, I illustrated the subject in Krita!
It's a little underexposed and unsaturated because the lights in the scene add their own colour, too. I focused on getting the basic hues and shadows right, and I'm proud of how it came out!
Next, there's the scene where everything goes together:
The compositing work is real messy. I normally do all this stuff in Resolve but here I thought I might as well learn how to do it all in Blender! So mostly I was playing around with the different nodes 'til I got something kind of like what I had in my head! (Don't worry I cleaned it up for the final render) Thankfully compositing is almost always the same:
Render separate AOVs, view layers, all that. Separate the foreground, background, and other elements.
Adjust each individually as needed.
Combine them based on depth information.
Colour correct and apply effects (order's up to you)
Apply lens effects, blurs, etc.
Apply some look transforms (did these in resolve)
Define an output transform (also in resolve)
In Blender I just cherrypicked what I needed and went through those steps:
And that's it! It was a fun experiment and I definitely spent more time on it than I should have, but I think I learned a lot about using Blender for this kinda stuff! Opens up a lot of opportunities to develop my style! It was also a bit therapeutic.
Thanks for reading! <3 I hope everyone had a great holiday season. Gonna post some alts tomorrow!
