Week 1
When coming up with pitch ideas, my team naturally came to the conclusion that we were going to do a commercial on a perfume/cologne bottle. The commercials in the industry for these products are wildly creative and are rich in visuals When conveying what we all wanted to do for the project, we narrowed it down to two bottles. The first one being "Respect" by David Beckham, and the other being "Alien" by Thierry Mugler. Sadly due to time constraints we decided to only pitch the Alien cologne; however, we decided to keep some elements from the David Beckham pitch since it incorporated well into the pitch for Thiery Mugler's cologne.
Idea #1 Thiery Mugler's "Alien Man
For the commercial project pitch for Harbor, my group decided to do ours on Thiery Mugler's "Alien Man". A fragrance with a simple yet elegant bottle design.
Environment
For the environment, we took some inspiration from Thierry Mugler's 2018 Alien commercial (as seen above). While this was a good reference, we did not want to completely copy Mugler's vision and wanted to make our own concept of the fragrance. We decided take the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" as one of our key references for the surrounding environment in which the bottle will be placed in.
References
When thinking about assets and elements that will go into this environment, we liked the idea of using the movie "2001: The Space Odyssey" and wanted to build more off of that idea. For the lighting aspect of this environment, we looked at the excavation scenes from The Space Odyssey. We also looked at Steven Spielberg's movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" for reference as well since it utilized similar lighting in some scenes along with Odyssey that we could possibly look at for inspiration.
After we locked in our environment and lighting for the scene, we then all looked at camera movement to see how we would showcase the fragrance as well as the environment surrounding it. We soon found a video that showcased camera movements that we liked, but also had lighting elements that we could possibly use to help bring attention to the fragrance bottle.
With a ring light showcasing the bottles intricate details, we sought to utilize both the lighting and the camera motions. One down side to using this video as a reference is that although the camera motions are great, they are a bit to slow and robotic in nature. We started experimenting with the cameras motions when developing the previs, but it still needs work.
Custom Skybox: Stars and Eclipse
When looking at some of the mood board and reference images that my team gathered, one particular image caught our eye. It showed a purple environment with many varying purple hues incorporated into the scene. In the middle of this environment was a purple eclipse.
When thinking about how we could make this project more detailed and in depth, we came up with the idea to utilize the sky atmosphere system in UE5. The custom sky box will show a more detailed sky with stars resembling the milky way, being able to render stars from behind clouds, and a subtle flickering effect on the stars.
