Architecture

AO2, AO3

Summary

My sub-theme of architecture explores an aspect of manmade structure. I am particularly interested in different architectural styles and am lucky enough to live in a city that is more than 1000 years old with many beautiful and historic buildings. The work consists of a short video promoting a walking tour company in Oxford that shows tourists the old colleges and churches. The video was created using 3 primary programs: Blender, Premiere Pro, Photoshop as well as various 3rd party extensions for Blender like RenderDoc. It mixes my photography and digital art skills to create the short film.

finalfinal.mp4

Plan and Client

The idea was to develop a short video for a travel company in Oxford offering tours of the city and showing off the beautiful historical architecture that can be found in and around the University. I was planning on creating 3D renders of the city using google maps and Blender as I'd previously seen this done online. I wanted to pair the images with classical music as Oxford is usually considered quite an elegant city and I have been to classical concerts in some of the old buildings.

I started to look through possible tourist agencies and guides until I found one that I thought would fit my brief. This was a small tourism agency that offers walking tours of Oxford. The reason I chose it was not only that they were a perfect fit for my idea, but because out of all the tourism companies offering tours of Oxford, their logo was the most sleek and elegant one.

Creating The Piece

To start off, I headed into the centre of Oxford, taking a tripod to make sure I was able to shoot stable footage. I opted to focus on taking video of the historic university buildings as this is what Oxford is best known for and what attracts most tourists. My photographs and videos turned out vibrant and showed off the old buildings very well. Next, I found a YouTube tutorial explaining how to import Google Maps data into Blender. I followed it and had to install a program named RenderDoc that recorded the data displayed on Chrome, turning it into files which could be imported into Blender. In Blender, I now had a model of Oxford city centre, however it was very low quality due to google maps not doing super detailed models. Despite the low resolution, I proceeded and inserted a moving camera to render some flying shots.

With the renders done and the footage taken, it was time to compile everything in Premiere Pro. My choice of music was Winter from The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi as it was a famous classical piece that I believed would fit perfectly with an advertisement for Oxford's historic beauty. The process of compiling the video was fairly simple as it was basically just matching footage to a soundtrack. I made a rough sketch of what I wanted the layout to be like and started ordering the pictures and videos. For some of the footage, I added effects: a stabiliser effect to the videos to smooth the slight shakiness, greyscale to the film-like part, overall contrast and hue changes to make everything appear more vibrant, as well as lens flares for general aesthetic. I added free sound effects I found online to add some ambience to the video.

Evaluation

Generally I thought this was one of my weaker pieces of work. There were many things I liked about it such as the satellite image that zoom in on Oxford or the old film style scroll shot of the images. However, I thought a lot of the footage was either of bad quality or not particularly interesting. For example, the 3D shots were all extremely low quality both in texture and polygonal count. This was out of my control of course as google maps didn't allow for a higher image quality. However, I still think there were other things I could've done better. For example the shot of people walking down the high-street: not only did it not include any of the old historic buildings which was the entire point of the advert, but it also was just a very poor camera placement choice by me. Overall, I think I've learnt a lot from this brief, and consider these things when working on a new piece.

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