TITLE: "The Drama of Cinema"
NAME: Glenn McCarter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gmccarter@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/2006/
TOPIC: Arts and Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cinema.jpg
ZIPFILE: cinema.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 

        Moray (for bezier patch creation)
  Paint Shop Pro (to convert image to JPEG)

RENDER MUSIC: Phillip Glass "Glassworks"

RENDER TIME: 
    6d 10h 44m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-90


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  Catherine strolls onward, resolute.
   Her footsteps quietly echo in the empty street.
   We watch, transfixed,
   as she walks away from the camera,
   her dreams shattered,
   her future uncertain.
  A rose petal falls silently in the rain.

This image is a poignant moment from the classic "On Stockton Square"
starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Olivia de Havilland. This movie was
released in 1940, and was the first example of "selective colorizing",
in which color is added to a specific object in an otherwise
black & white movie, for dramatic effect.

The technique was successfully used later in "Rumble Fish" (1983)
and "Schindler's List" (1993), and, more recently, in various music videos
and commercial advertisements. These use optical and computer technology,
but "On Stockton Square" did it the old fashioned way: individual
celluloid frames were each tinted by hand!



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is my most ambitious, yet most subtle, image to date.
As usual, I created everything in this scene.
The cars are modified from an earlier scene of mine, but
all other objects were created specifically for this IRTC image.
Everything was created directly in the POV-Ray text editor,
except for the bezier patches. They were manipulated in Moray,
exported to POV-Ray, then textured and CSG'd in POV-Ray.
The movie scene is 100% raytraced: no image_maps and no post-processing
were used.  It took over 6 days to render.  This scene was then mapped
onto the movie theater screen, along with special lighting described
below.  The theater scene took under 4 hours to render.

SET DESIGNER ........................................... Glenn McCarter
When working in greyscale, you *must* pay attention to textures.
Object "A" and object "B" cannot be distinguished by their color.
So the only elements that give objects their character is surface 
roughness (texture normal), blending of various shades of grey
(color_maps), and reflectivity/highlights (texture finish).

Many special textures are used througout this scene.  For example,
the wet puddlles of water on the street and sidewalk is
very complex.  It's actually two reflective textures, combined together
with a texture_map.  One texture has small, "grainy" bumps to
simulate actively-rained-upon surfaces.  The other has large "wavy" bumps
to look like puddles of slightly deeper standing water.
I gave many textures in this scene some bumpiness to simulate the
rough, gritty surfaces commonly found in the city.
Most of the grey textures in the scene actually have a slight amount
of color -- instead of rgb<.4,.4,.4>, I might use rgb<.42,.43,.40>.
I call this "subliminal color".  Instead of purely neutral grey, each
has a warmer or colder tint.  This adds to the feeling of realism.

CARPENTER ........................................... Glenn McCarter
This project had a few special challenges:
The rain is defined in an include file as thousands of individual
raindrops, each made from a blob, each slightly different.
The trash can exterior is dented via blobs; then an identical, smaller,
copy is subtracted to form the inside walls of the trash can.  The
lettering on the trash can is made similarly, which allows it to follow
the contours of the dents on the trash can.  Diamond-shaped boxes are
then subtracted to form the holes in the sidewall.
The rose petals, stem, leaves, woman's legs and shoes, raincoat, and
crumpled trash are all bezier patches.
The umbrella is just a CSG of 38 cylinders.  The park bench is also a
simple CSG of torii, cylinders, and boxes.
44 buildings were constructed and placed throughout the scene, most
of them "off camera" to make proper reflections in windows.  The nearest
buildings have the most detail, including cracked steps and air vents.
If you look closely at the scene, you might be able to see a manhole cover,
the open lid on a tin can, and the spike of a high-heel shoe.

LIGHTING TECHNICIAN ...................................... Glenn McCarter
How do you make a convincing night-time scene...in the rain...in a dark movie
theater...without the whole image being black?  Through effective lighting.
The lights are strategically placed to provide key highlights, either
directly or as silhouettes.  The main streetlights are double-brightness,
to produce a high-contrast image typically seen in early motion pictures.
In addition, a translucent filter is added just in front of the camera.
This tints the entire scene in a very slight sepia tone, adding warmth
and an "old-time" look to the image.  Finally, the raytraced movie scene
is "projected" onto the white movie screen as an image_map, and lit with
a very bright "projection light" which shines through a rectangle cutout
to illuminate only the screen, but not the theater.  The rest of the theater
is dimly lit with a small lightsource near the projector, to simulate stray
light on the stage and curtain.  This stray light source is blocked with a
rectangle box to prevent it from illuminating (and washing out) the movie
screen.

EDITOR ........................................... Glenn McCarter
Note that the movie scene is fully parameterized.
By changing a few simple switches in the scene, you can
re-render it with full color or greyscale, wet or dry, raining or not.
Also, most surfaces here are reflective.
So if you choose to re-render this scene from the zipfile, beware,
  because it's raining in this scene.
  Because it's raining, nearly everything is wet.
  Because it's wet, nearly everything is reflective.
  Because of the reflections, the image takes nearly forever to render! <g>

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................
The producers wish to thank Scott McCarter for constructive
criticism during the pre-production process.

A subOrbital production, 1997.  All rights reserved.

This picture is completely POV-Ray.  Any resemblance to other
renderers, commercial or shareware, is purely coincidental.

No bits were harmed in the making of this raytracing.


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