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FAMILY ROOM

In the "Family Room scene", Emelia having come home from school is hoping to spend some time in the "family room" together with her parents after a horrible day at school, but soon discovers that the presence of the TV makes this room a nightmarish place. Slack jaws, glazed eyes, obnoxious commercials, reality shows, local news, welcome to the hell that is television.


Directors often have a "trademark" that seems to show up in all of their films. John Woo has his doves. I have disgusting mouths. I'm not sure why. Mouths just sort of freak me out. Making this particular mouth was a lot of fun because as research I had to eat some buttered popcorn (you see the sacrifices one must make for art?) I then proceeded to watch myself chew with an open mouth in a mirror, and spit some of the chewed popcorn onto my desk to get a closer look at it.





The technique that I arrived at for both the popcorn in the bowl and the chewed up popcorn in her mouth was a combination of animated sprites (that means an image on a card) and clusters of spheres with projected images and blured edges. I then animated all the kernels by hand to get that nice sloshing feel. Mmmm, this is all making me hungry.






To get the glistening taste buds I put the specular channel into a procedural texture called "Leather" (dont ask me why they call it that) which produces polka dots. Now that I think about it I used the same procedural texture in the leather couch so I guess it is not such a bad name for it. Dad wanted to eat some popcorn too, but unfortunately has no mouth.



Another fun thing to do was to animate the flickering lights and twitching shadows cast by the glow from the television. As the commercials get progressively more tasteless, the lights and shadows become more and more disturbing until the scene reaches a psychedelic crescendo of monster truck commercials and zombie like parents with glazed over eyes and mouths filled with popcorn goo.

The scene ends with a very ticked off Emelia slamming the door to her room at the top of the stairs. Her mom stops watching TV for a second thinking she might have heard something, but then shrugs her shoulders and goes back to watching the "one eyed monster". I love this picture of Emelia because even though she is trying really hard to look menacing, she still looks adorable. Poor little dear. Don't you hate television?





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