Building a mountain

I guess I haven't written much about the project I am working on for school.

My film is about a mountain and two mountaineers.

The past few weeks I have been building this mountain. I had a rough outline of what the mountain needed to be from my storyboards. What should be roughly where. I had enormous books, with gigantic pictures of Mount Everest and Mount Blanc borrowed out of the library for weeks. I had thought a lot about this mountain.

I sculpted a tiny version of the mountain and adjacent mountains in plasticine. I painted watercolours of the mountain.

And the last week I have been finally creating the mountain in 3d. For along time it felt really small in the computer, just like the model that I had sitting on my desk. But today, I started in on the details. I started adding parts where the characters would actually be up close and personal.

Finally I added little stand-ins for the characters, just to get the idea of the scale of things.

I put my virtual camera right next to these tiny little figures, and suddenly the massive scale of the thing I had created took shape.

It's a primal feeling that I get when I work in 3d, where I am no longer looking at a virtual set, but I feel like I am there.

I put myself at the top of the mountain, and I felt unease, vertigo, high above the glacier I had just created.

Right there, that feeling, is why I like 3d, why I like computers, why I use his medium and not any others.


Kyler