Making Giants - The Edit

Music : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : So we've got ourselves an idea and it's even starting to feel fleshed out a little bit. Uh, we found a music track. We like, we found a cool quote to sort of tie the whole thing together. So, I mean, we're in business now, the next step is to cut an animatic so we can figure out how long each shot is going to be and to get a feel for what the final piece will be like. So you can do this using the Photoshop sketches, but since this is going to be a cinematic 3d piece, I thought it made a little more sense to do the rough edit, kind of like a [inaudible] on like a movie, uh, just using rough 3d shapes and blocking out the framing and action and camera movement as quickly as possible. So let's just jump right into cinema 4d and get going.
Joey Korenman : Our goal in cinema 4d right now is to try and strip away all of the unnecessary decision-making all we want to figure out is where's the camera going to go? How fast is the camera gonna move? How's the framing going to look? So we are going to totally ignore details about, you know, the way the building's going to look and, and you know, the exact textures and lighting and all that stuff we're going to use. We're not gonna focus on that right now. So first I want to set up my scene, um, and I'm going to set it up using that 1920 by eight 20 resolution that we figured out, uh, in the last video. And I'm going to be working at 24 frames a second. When you change your frame rate in cinema 4d, you have to do it in two spots. You have to change it here and your render settings, but you have to have to, you also have to change it here in your project settings.
Joey Korenman : Cool. So now we're, uh, we're set up. We're good to go. Um, one thing I like to do, so cinema 4d sort of, uh, it puts like a little darken kind of filter overlaid on your viewer here. So you can see your render area, but it's not very dark. It doesn't give me a great idea of what my framing is going to look like. So what I like to do is hit the shift V hot key. It brings up your viewport settings for whatever the current active viewport is. And if you go to your view settings, you can actually change this tinted border to have more capacity. So you can totally block it out. I don't want to do that, but I do want it to be fairly dark. I'm gonna leave it at maybe 80%. So now I just get a much better idea of what my frame is going to look like.
Joey Korenman : All right. So there are, um, there's a few elements that we just need to add to the scene. So obviously there's going to be, um, a building. All right. And so the stand in for that can just be a cube. Um, and so I do want to make sure that I'm actually using the ground plane here as the ground, and, you know, by default cinema brings in 3d objects kind of in the middle of the ground. And so I'm going to do is, um, I'm just going to sort of roughly shape this like a building. Um, and then I'm going to hit the C key to make it editable. I'm going to open up in the mesh menu, uh, access center, which is one of the most useful tools and all of a cinema 4d. And I'm going to turn on auto update and then just scoot the Y down to negative 100.
Joey Korenman : And you can see this just moves the axis around on your object. Right. Um, so I just want it right in the middle, but at the bottom, there you go. And so what's cool is that now I can just zero out the white position on the cube and it's directly on the ground. Cool. So there's our buildings stand in. Awesome. All right. So then we're also going to need a plant and we're also going to need a ground. Um, so I'm just going to use a plane for this, and this can be our, our ground. Um, and I don't need any detail in it. I'm going to turn the width and height segments down to one, and then I'm just going to scale this thing up. So it's really, really big. All right, cool. Um, so next, we're going to need a plant and we're going to need some mountains.