TITLE: Rosebud
NAME: Mike Sawyer
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: msawyer@callware.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.itsnet.com/~stylus
TOPIC: Childhood
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rosebud.jpg
ZIPFILE: rosebud.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-RAY for Windows 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    no post-processing. PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro, and Illustrator for
imagemap creation.

RENDER TIME: 
    ?

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 100, 32 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    This scene shows Charles Foster Kane's abandoned sled,
"Rosebud," a metaphor
for the childhood Mr. Kane left behind in the great movie "Citizen Kane."

Sometimes the simple, basic things are those which we have the greatest yearning
for.
It's different for everyone.
It might be a toy.
Or your first car.
Or a person.
Or whatever.
For Charles Kane, it was the favorite toy of his childhood.
He left it behind as he began a life of wealth and power.

Sad.

But he found it again, if you recall--the fact that Rosebud was among Citizen
Kane's belongings at the
end of the movie indicated that, sometime in his life, he tracked it down and
re-acquired it. So maybe
he got back just a taste of his childhood.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Trivia: What was the name of the fancy new sled Charles got the very next
Christmas, his first Christmas
after leaving the boarding house? (He obviously wasn't very pleased with the
thing.) For the answer,
e-mail me at msawyer@callware.com.

-----------
The sled used for the actual sledding scene in the film was made of pine.
Look-alikes were made of balsa
(I guess to help them burn quicker in the final scene). The pine sled was sold
at auction in late 1996 for
$233,500. Steven Spielberg owns one of the balsa versions. One thing we know for
sure: nobody owns the sled
that was burned up.

-----------
No "Flexible Flyer" here--when Kane was a boy, the most famous _real_ sled of
all time was still
about twenty years away from production.

-----------
The house, "Mrs. Kane's Boarding House," is a faithful reproduction of the
movie's set. Take a look at
the movie and see! The setting was supposed to be in Little Salem, Colorado.

I kept it black and white to better reflect the period of the movie, allowing
color only on the sled to
help it stand out.

Scene placement and most objects were modeled on a scale of one unit = one
inch.

The sled--hooo, boy. This was a lot of work. After slow-motioning my VCR a few
times to get a general
idea for the sled, I crafted the basic shape and structure of it. I wanted it to
look worn & used, but
not really beat-up, so with Differences I took chips out here & there. The VCR
had its limitations, tho,
as the movie recording was done at SLP on an old tape. I found what's gotta be
the only color picture of
Rosebud on the Internet at http://www.odysseygroup.com/coll397/auction.htm. This
gave me the colors I was
looking for, to help the sled stand out in the scene. But the picture was of the
sled at an angle, so
I couldn't just imagemap it onto my sled. An imagemap was absolutely necessary
for this, as the level of
detail needed for the sled just couldn't be done with POV. So, by hand &
eyeball, I recreated the colors,
shapes, & designs in Adobe Illustrator. That gave me a "perfect" picture of the
sled, how it may have
looked brand new. Then, in Adobe Photoshop, I placed the EPS image (which
smoothed it some) and by hand
I "weathered" and "aged" it. I realize some of the blemishes from the sled's
picture on the Internet may
have happened after the filming of the movie, but this color picture is the most
accurate representation
I could find, so I had to go by it. If you want to bother, compare the finished
product with the picture
I sketched it from (find the picture at the Internet address above). I think I
came pretty dadburned close.
One thing (actually two things) was missing from the original sled that was
auctioned off--the metal runners
that curled around the tips of each wood runner. The sled in this scene includes
those. The font used for
the text "Rosebud" is a Woodcuts font.

The font used for the boarding house sign is Casablanca Antique. It was
imagemapped onto a board.

The footprints in the snow, the driveway, ruts, and snowy drifts are all height
fields.

The snow on the roof is mostly just boxes & cylinders, but placed carefully, so
they have a nicely rounded &
smooth effect.

I wanted the sky to look "cold," so I thought of using a pale blue with white,
whispy clouds, but I felt
I should stick with black & white. The best way to convey a harsh, hostile, cold
sky in black & white was
to use bright white clouds contrasted starkly with an almost black sky. I really
liked the effect, as it
turned out.

The wood pile is a bunch of wood cylinders with bark, different sizes, some
split. I actually just made one
log, then scaled its diameter for some logs and chopped ("differenced") some to
show split wood. I like the
effect.

This is my first attempt at entering a POV image for competition, so be gentle
PLEEEEEEZ.


