To be able to pull off any good result in VFX, reference plays a key role. It can become a tedious task to collect said reference (unless it’s a Pixar field trip or something) but it sure does pay off in the end result of whatever project you are doing.
For the car project (see previous post) we have gathered reference, again, focused on overall look (lighting, mood, etc.) and effects (tractor beam, cracking of road, soil, particles, etc.).
Superman Lift-off
Asphalt Cracking
Once the car is being lifted, the beam is (clearly) very strong, so it ends up pulling chunks of asphalt from the road.
(Yet another!) Asphalt Cracking
A Sinkhole
There’s plenty of reference that was gathered for this project, but its distributed into separate blogs. For example, Bradley has pretty cool videos of the ground cracking. Elyssa gathered day to night and material reference on her blog. And Sarah gathered everything and put it together as a project in a cohesive and coherent way on her blog.
Also, here are a couple of shots used for the original idea of the car speeding on the road with the UFO chasing after. This was (as you already know if you’ve been reading this blog) ultimately scraped, but still, if you like watching cars going fast with some camera shake, here are two GIFs (I don’t care what the creator of this says. I pronounce it like a hard G) for you.
And with these last words, I conclude all I have to say about reference (for now?). Tomorrow we’ll be presenting our pitch to the nice people of The Mill. If you wanna keep us in your #thoughts&prayers for tomorrow 😜, keep in mind that our group name is Area 51, get it? UFO? Area 51? Argh… never mind… alright, bye.
