GAMES DEVELOPMENT PORTFOLIO: Colossus

We were set the task of creating several "Colossus" images, in which we had a picture of a landscape and digitally added in a human figure, scaled to look like a giant against the images. The images should be of a high quality, and presented in a flat image as well as a 3D image format. To ensure that this was completed accurately and correctly, I researched some examples of digital manipulation used in movies, TV and advertisements.

Research

The research we carried out on this task involved finding some examples of of images from all media sources. I looked into finding some examples of existing advertisements which have used a similar form of digital manipulation to make a character look like a giant against the set background. I also found some imaged for movies or TV purposes which have used a similar level of digital manipulation.

This advertisement for Powerade shows a giant man standing in a stadium as hundreds of smaller men run towards him. This is a good example of the kind of manipulation we will perform to produce our images, as it shows the character who is easily distinguishable as a giant. This image shows a large number of figures, which I will not use in my images, as it would look too cramped, but I do like the way that the background is fairly empty and has a lot of sky in the image. I will use this in my images as having a lot of sky will open up a variety of potential poses for my colossi to do.

Another example of digital manipulation to make a character look huge is the 2010 movie Gulliver's Travels, in which Jack Black finds an island inhabited by toy people who see him as a giant. The imagery in this film, and the advertising around it also captures the style of manipulation we will make use of in our images. I like the variation in pose of this image, as it shows the "giant" lying down, which gives me some new ideas of ways to have my models pose for my images, for example one could be lying across a road instead of standing.

Both of the images that I found so far for my research showed a giant character surrounded by smaller individuals, to give them a sense of scale. However, I will instead use buildings and the landscape to give my characters the imposed size in relation to their surroundings. This will give me a little more space to work with in my images, and will also mean that I don't have to spend the time to shrink down other characters, and will free up more time to complete more high-quality images.

This poster from the movie Anchorman 2 shows an example of the effect which I will be trying to recreate in my own images. While there is some smaller figures in the shot, the most notable way that a viewer can tell the characters are giants is the buildings in the background. By scaling the characters to this size, this gives a "forced perspective" effect that tricks the user into seeing the characters as giants. This is the technique that I will be using to create my colossus images.

Also featured in the Anchorman movie poster is the legating effects on each character. As they are standing tall against a setting sun, they each have a glow around the outer edge of them, which helps them to fit into the image better and blend with the background to give them a more natural look.

I looked for an example of the anaglyph 3D effect that we would be using on our finalised images. This effect shows two copies of the image, with one only showing the red Colour Channel, and the other showing the blue and green, making a cyan Colour Channel. These Channels would be slightly offset to the left and right, and would be viewed through special 3D glasses with red and cyan filters to allow the colour to show through. I chose to use an image from the movie Avatar to see this style of anaglyph 3D in effect.

Although I will be using the effects displayed in the Anchorman poster, I certainly can use some of the effects, poses and spacial usage shown in the Gulliver's Travels and the Powerade posters. I feel that, when combining the techniques from each poster, as well as adding the 3D anaglyph effect as shown in the Avatar poster, I will be able to create some high-quality colossus images.

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Capturing Images

We went up to the roof of College to take some pictures of the building around the are to get some shots with interesting perspective which we could use to digitally superimpose a colossus onto. These images were mainly of the taller buildings in the area, as they gave more variation within the image, and something for the colossus to interact with within the picture. We took a fair amount of images each and chose 6 of our favourite images to use as possible backgrounds to use for the task of creating the colossus images. These are the 6 images I chose to use:

Once we had our chosen background images, we went to the photography studio to take shots of classmates, who would be our models for the colossi in the images. We took a closer look at the lighting in each of the images and tried to recreate it with the tools available to us in the studio, including bouncing a floodlight from the ceiling to give an impression of sunlight. We also used smaller "redhead" lights to recreate the directional lighting from the images, so the colossi would blend in better with the lighting in the picture. Here are a few examples of the images I captured for my images. Once we had the images of the models, and of the landscapes, we were ready to import the images into Photoshop to create the final images.

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Image Creation

To start creating my images, I opened PhotoShop and opened the image that I would use for my background. To start with I chose this image, as I felt it was very atmospheric and would make a good shot:

I double clicked the background layer to block it. Next I placed the image I wanted to use into the image and resized it to the appropriate scale.

I rasterized the image and began to remove the white background with the Magic Wand tool. I cleaned up any pieces left over by using the Lasso tool.

I zoomed in and noticed that my character still had a thin white line around him which made him stand out too much, so I selected outside of the character with the Magic Wand tool, and went to Select > Modify > Feather. I set the radius to 2 pixels and pressed delete a couple of times. This removed the white line and softened the edges making my character blend into the shot better.

My character was still fully shown in the image, when in reality he would be standing behind the building, so I hid the character layer and selected around the edge of the building with the Lasso tool. I then reverted back to the character layer and removed the section of the legs that would be hidden in the final image. My character is now in place and the image is almost complete.

To make my character fit in the with colours in the image, I upend up the Hue tab by pressing Cmd + U. I then adjusted the Saturation and Brightness sliders until my character was a similar colour style and blended well with the background image. This meant lowering both the saturation and the brightness to give the same silhouetted effect as the buildings in the image.

Finally, before the image could be called complete, I reduced the image size down so it was more suitable for use on the web. To do this I went to Image > Image size and simply reduced the resolution from 300dpi to 72. This cut the image size down to a manageable size and also lowered the file size so it would load faster on a website, as well as saving storage space.

Now that my image is completed, I used the "Save for Web" tool to save the image whilst keeping the file size low. I increased the image quality to 100% and selected the JPG file type to keep the file size as low as possible for use on the web. I chose a suitable file name and location before exporting my image.

Now that my original image has been exported, I began to work on creating a 3D version of my image. I started this by merging the layers of the image down to create a single flat image layer, which I then duplicated.

I double clicked the layer tab to open the layer settings. On the duplicated layer I disconnected the Blue and Green colour channels, leaving only the Red channel connected. On the original layer, i disconnected the Red channel, leaving the Blue and Green, creating a Cyan channel.