The Start of Revision

Pursuing Imagination is a blog of my pursuit of bettering my portfolio and keeping my imagination active. This will serve a space for my sketches and for my demo reel as I work to improve it. As a start to this blog, I present my demo reel. It is far from done or perfect, but I am posting it here as a starting point. I want to show my progress on it and how I overcome different challenges within.

I shot all of the footage myself, and created all of the assets as well. Please make sure to view in HD.

First on my list to tackle is the kitchen scene. While it is looking fine so far, it is missing all of the details that create a story. It may be a nice scene, but without the details it is just that, a scene. With debris such as a broken tea set or broken tiles on the counters, the eye becomes more intrigued and is drawn to specific places throughout the scenes. Right now there are things that draw your eye, but not in the places or ways that I necessarily want it. As I fine tune the scene and add more detail I will craft it clearly into the story I want told.

After that I will work on my Chicago scene. Most of the problems in this scene are the product of time constraints. I ran out of time to finish it to my liking because it proved to be a much larger challenge than I anticipated. First and foremost though, I am going to tackle the one problem that was not a result of time. I found that when I was replacing parts of the scene and painting in what wasn’t visible in the original footage, there was one section that I could not see or guess as to what should go there. This section was the left-hand side of the sidewalk on the right of the footage. No matter what I tried, I could not paint anything that looked correct. I even looked on google maps street view in order to glean the information off of that, but it didn’t show it either. Since I had shot the footage myself, I knew exactly where the intersection was and everything about it. If I had been in my hometown, I would have caught the first train into Chicago and gotten it myself. However, I wasn’t home in Indiana, I was in Florida, so I bided my time. This past summer I finally made it home and took the first train into the windy city. I now know that there are fenced in planters there and have taken the pictures I need to complete it. You can view these elusive planters in one of my reference pictures below. 

So in other words, I will be tackling the biggest issues first and working my way down to the smaller details. I look forward to making more progress on this, especially now that I’ve finally problem solved the long and laborious task in the Chicago footage.