HARBOR + SCAD

Project Kickoff

January 6th - 2025

Class 1

In our first class, we had our project kickoff meeting, where we learned about the project and the expectations for this quarter.

Our challenge is developing an advertisement that uses a luxury brand or evokes something luxurious. To achieve this goal, we have two ways to approach it, each with prerequisites.

Option 1 - Product / endtag / demo all 3D.

Requirements:

• Create VFX to showcase a product's high-quality imagery.

• At least five shots of the object with effects.

Option 2 - Product / endtag / demo CGI integration to Live Action.

Requirements:

• Create VFX to showcase a product's high-quality imagery.

• Live Action plates photographed by students.

• VFX should look photorealistic with the product integrated.

• At least two shots of the object with effects integrated into the Live Action.

Also, there are some general requirements that we need to fulfill.

• Variety of shots in a sequence (wide, medium, closeup)

• Movement in the plates (Camera or Actor movement if applicable)

• VFX should be photoreal

• References

• Software options: Nuke, Houdini, Karma, Redshift, Maya, Arnold, Unreal Engine, Substance, Adobe Suite, DaVinci.

After explaining the projects, we were assigned teams with people we did not know. I am so excited to be part of Team Carat with Soi Park, Yilin Zhao, Mia Esparragoza, and Zane Kidwell.

January 8th - 2025

Introductions with the mentors

During the second class of the week, we introduced ourselves to the Harbor mentors. It was exciting and essential to understand their expectations for this project.

After this meeting with the mentors, we reunited as groups and decided on what project we would take on. We had multiple ideas about what product to take some of the categories where:

• Lipstick

• Jewelry

• Watches

• Perfumes

• Biking computers

After some discussion, we determined that jewelry was the best category for our ideas and objectives. Quickly after that, we decided to do rings. We decided to use the Bulgari Serpenti ring from the following Collection.

https://www.bulgari.com/en-int/collection/serpenti.html?srsltid=AfmBOookdHyYVI1BJZ-xwYuwjVKFEG2kAEE_0QC-UpEV1GoLInQPuCZH

After deciding on our project, we developed our pitch to show the mentors what we wanted to do during this 10-week experience.

January 9th - 13th 2025

Pitch development

Developing a story for a pitch can be challenging because your story should be interesting, and people need to understand the story in a 30-second commercial. We started developing multiple ideas for what the story should be and how everything should look like, and for that first meeting, we settled on a story. Shout out to my teammate Zane for helping us do the story board drawings. The following story board was the first vesion of our story.

After multiple discussions on our Slack channel and Zoom meetings, we changed the story a bit. We are doing live-action integration with all 3D scenes as a team. Despite all of us working on the story, we decided to divide and conquer to achieve the development and depth we wanted in our Pitch. My responsibilities included:

• Logline.

• References.

• Helping with the story.

• Schedule.

• Previs - Live Action scene with Soi Park.

• Editing previs.

• Merging everything and editing the Pitch.