Week 1 Progress

When coming up with pitch ideas, my team naturally came to the conclusion that we were going to do a commercial on a perfume/cologne bottle. The commercials in the industry for these products are wildly creative and are rich in visuals When conveying what we all wanted to do for the project, we narrowed it down to two bottles. The first one being "Respect" by David Beckham, and the other being "Alien" by Thierry Mugler. Sadly due to time constraints we decided to only pitch the Alien cologne; however, we decided to keep some elements from the David Beckham pitch since it incorporated well into the pitch for Thiery Mugler's cologne.

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Idea #1 : Thiery Mugler's "Alien Man"

For the commercial project pitch for Harbor, my group decided to do ours on Thiery Mugler's "Alien Man".

A fragrance with a simple yet elegant bottle design.

Environment

For the environment, we took some inspiration from Thierry Mugler's 2018 Alien commercial (as seen above). While this was a good reference, we did not want to completely copy Mugler's vision and wanted to make our own concept of the fragrance. We decided take the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" as one of our key references for the surrounding environment in which the bottle will be placed in.

References

When thinking about assets and elements that will go into this environment, we liked the idea of using the movie "2001: The Space Odyssey" and wanted to build more off of that idea. For the lighting aspect of this environment, we looked at the excavation scenes from The Space Odyssey. We also looked at Steven Spielberg's movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" for reference as well since it utilized similar lighting in some scenes along with Odyssey that we could possibly look at for inspiration.

After we locked in our environment and lighting for the scene, we then all looked at camera movement to see how we would showcase the fragrance as well as the environment surrounding it. We soon found a video that showcased camera movements that we liked, but also had lighting elements that we could possibly use to help bring attention to the fragrance bottle.

With a ring light showcasing the bottles intricate details, we sought to utilize both the lighting and the camera motions. One down side to using this video as a reference is that although the camera motions are great, they are a bit to slow and robotic in nature. We started experimenting with the cameras motions when developing the previs, but it still needs work.

Custom Sky Box: Stars

When thinking about how we could make this project more detailed and in depth, we came up with the idea to utilize the sky atmosphere system in UE5. The custom sky box will show a more detailed sky with stars resembling the milky way, being able to render stars from behind clouds, and a subtle flickering effect on the stars.

Custom Sky Box: Eclipse

When looking at some of the mood board and reference images that my team gathered, one particular image caught our eye. It showed a purple environment with many varying purple hues incorporated into the scene. In the middle of this environment was a purple eclipse.

After seeing this image, we came up with the idea of instead of having a normal moon in our scene, we would have an eclipse instead. After doing some research, we found someone who not only managed to create an eclipse, but also animate one as well. One challenge with trying to achieve this effect is that the animated eclipse calls for complex blueprints that have very little record recorded online. This will prove to be a challenge in the future that hopefully me and my team can overcome in the future.

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Idea #2 : David Beckham's "Respect"

David Beckham's cologne "Respect" was our first choice for our project pitch. With the bottle's noticeable rippled design and metallic finish, the bottle was an appealing product for us to consider. Sadly this pitch idea did not come into fruition and we had to scrap it due to time constraints.

Environment

With the original message of the bottle eluding to it's title, we can see that the the original commercial for this bottle shows images and scenes of team members, fighters, families, and people showing some kind of respect towards one another. The team saw this as a good starting point to come up with ideas for the environment, but we wanted to still create something new in contrast of the original commercial without totally getting rid of the fragrances original message. When compiling ideas, we knew we wanted to have a dark environment to surround the bottle. We also wanted a strong since of color present in the environment that melded well with the bottles nature. In the end we decided to go with the idea of a vast dark blue foggy ocean environment with the only light in the scene coming from a full moon and a piercing beam of light being emitted from a lighthouse.

References

For references we had to find some for more than one element of the environment. The most important element that we had to reference was the light house. We needed something that was small, secluded and would blend in with the surrounding environment. After thorough research and debate, we decided that the best reference for this was Bishop Rock. Located near the Isles of Scilly, the light house stands on tiny island in the middle of the ocean. Leaving the island to be remarkably secluded which was the look we were trying to achieve.

Lighting was another key factor that we needed to reference for this commercial. Though we had little of it, we knew that the lighting had to be true to David Beckham's brand while also blending in with the current environment we were trying to portray. Taking these elements into consideration we decided to reference Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" . With deep blues and a dense foggy atmosphere. The lighting for the night scenes in the movie were a perfect reference for our scene.