Lighting
When lighting the film, the main difficulty was to create a rather dark atmosphere while still allowing the viewer to see the action. The whole film takes place in a closed space, without windows and without light. We had to find a lighting that wouldn't feel weird within context.
It was also necessary, especially at the beginning, to highlight the mold with a lighting that shows the beauty of the mold. We chose an American night-style lighting combined with a macro lens effect. Our main lighting reference are the underground scenes in the Ghibli film Nausicca. During the chaos, we made a very bright lighting to accentuate the destruction, fear, and storm.
Lighting
Compositing
The "Empty" sequence is also in the same palette as the Chaos sequence, in order to keep on a theme of destruction. We also added a blueish to accentuate Shim’s side of sadness, cold, and despair.
For the final part, since he is discovering a new world that is both foreign and familiar to him, and to underline his joy of discovery, we chose a very warm and natural lighting.
In total, we had five different lighting presets for different sequences.
Light pass and layers
Most of our lighting had about five to six lights per shot. The main ones that are always present are the Sky dome light , a Key light, a Fill light, a Rim light, and a Bounce light.
We added when necessary, a Spotlight to add some texture to the light with leaves, clouds... etc.
SPOT
RIM
SKY
KEY
BOUNCE
FILL
Lighting
Compositing
In the render passes, we separated the scenery, the character, and the FX so that the rendering and compositing went as smoothly as possible. The environment passes had to be done first as they took the longest to render.
Environment
Character
FX
The biggest hardships we got regarding the passes were the Cryptomatte pass (mentioned in the environment page) and the Vector motion pass. We had to tweak the settings for each asset in each scene in order for them to work as intended.
Light gradient
In the reconstruction sequence, we wanted to have a lighting gradient as we move forward in time in the story. At the beginning of the sequence, the atmosphere is very bright and dims with the construction of the jungle, until we settle on a dark, blue-green lighting.
Light animation
In this scene, it was necessary that we make a light animation to convey the change in atmosphere, of another universe opening up to Shim. The lighting goes from a darker blue to a bright orange ray of sunlight doming from the outside world.
Lighting
