Seven Samurai
Pagoda
For this part of my project I decided that I would try and encapsulate the general feeling of feudal era Japan as this is the setting for Seven Samurai and many other films by director Akira Kurosawa.
I did this by generating architectural structures in Blender such as pagodas as I felt that this would be a good starting point for me to get a feeling for that sense of place.
Characters
I came up with some basic character designs based on the suits of samurai armours that would’ve been seen around this era to create different concepts for the samurai within this film.
Burning Building
For this image I looked at part of the script that describes a burning building and decided that one of the best ways to achieve this would be to create the building within Blender and then to create the landscape for this piece with a river running through the centre that could give reflections of the building on fire. I could use Blender’s lighting physics to better illustrate the light that would be coming off the flames of the burning building and reflecting off of different objects and surfaces. I could also use this to find the appropriate angle from which to capture this as again all would be constructed in Blender as a 3D piece allowing for choice of camera angles.
Rough sketch
Against a Tree
For this image I looked at part of the script that describes a Samurai leaning against the trunk of a tree as he relaxes with a flower in his hands. I decided to recreate the Japanese Maple tree as this would instantly link the scene to one of Japan’s native trees through its instant symbolism. To begin the creation of the tree I employed the particles simulation within Blender to create the multiple leaves from a single modelled leaf that I had created. This was a tedious process that took me a few hours to fully grasp but I believe I was successful in the end. I used a landscape model that I had made in World Creator as a background and layered it together to create my environment. I then lightened the sky as I felt that the atmosphere was too dark within my first image.
For the model of the Samurai I used the Metahuman software to create a face that I felt would be suited to the character within the script. I then used posing software to get a sense of the form and posture that the character would be taking within the image. I then placed the figure within he environment and drew on top of overlaying this with a grass texture to then finally finish off the environment with the character established and in position also.
