Create strong cinematic visuals

Film industry concept artist Chris Rosewarne explains his production process, as he models, renders and paints a cinematic keyframe

A Björk video inspires Chris Rosewarne to paint a robot.

The trick to creating a cinematic visual is all about being willing to lose detail, because the emphasis then shifts from the design of your model to the look of the shot itself. I’d achieve this by obscuring parts of the design in the shadow, or knock back details of certain elements through the use of atmospheric lighting.

It’s because of this that your design needs to have a quick, strong read and a bold silhouette, to enable it to be backlit or hit with key lighting from the side. These are just a couple of cinema’s lighting techniques for dialling up the drama in a scene, and we’re going to be employing them in this workshop.

Bearing this in mind, we’ll model with a high level of detail in areas of interest and keep the rest bold and simple. I like to make the software do the work so we’ll use components in SketchUp wherever possible to keep modelling time down to a minimum. All edges will be bevelled because KeyShot will pick these out in the render, which is essential in low-light environments and an important factor in making your models look believable. They’ll create slices of shadow or highlight that will help to describe the form.

Rendering software, while producing photo-realistic imagery, tends to render to 100 per cent black in certain areas, so we’ll be lifting and colouring the black point in Photoshop, painting in atmosphere and, with a “less is more” approach, dialling back detail to focus and lead the eye. The free SketchUp plugins Round Corner and Center Point All from www.sketchucation.com will come in handy for this workshop. Okay, let’s get this show on the road.