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The Hobbit was a school production performed by the drama dapartment on 9th July 2002 for King Edward VI School Lichfield. These pages aim to show what can be achieved with
the integration of CGI* into a traditional live performance. These
images were projected onto a screen on stage for added visual interest
during the scene changes. Some of the pictures were animated others
still. The main aim was to enable a performance of otherwise difficult
ideas to convey on stage. The best example of this was the scene
where the heroes had to escape down-river in barrels. Feedback after
the performance was remarkable to say the least! |
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The modeling techniques are discussed in more detail in the page opened by clicking the image. this image uses raytracing in a reflection channel, with objects downloaded as well a built by me. |
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More details on opening the page by clicking the image Here is a close up of Bag-end from outside. This utilised models from the previous image, with added surfaces for the landscape. Notice the details of leaves on the trees. |
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More details on opening the page by clicking the image Here I used the trees generated in the bagend outside image to make a bitmap with alpha channels to use in a facing rectangle. these I layered to create the density of the forest. |
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This forest view took a long time to render for a still. Two hours, but at least it beat the estimated time for an equivalent image in Bryce at 20 hours. Needless to say I cancelled that one before it finished. There are layers of textured plane objects as well as 2 modeled 3D trees in the foreground. | |
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Another relatively quick scene to make featuring volumetric lights as well as a combustion object (now called "Fire effect"). The barrels appeared in the next scene also. | |
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A kingpin animation, this scene was the most useful to the producer in that it avoided the need to perform a difficult scene with a school group of actors. | |
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Final scene used for "scene setting" | |
| Power Point | We used Microsoft Power Point to package
the various clips and stills. Mainly to ensure familiarity for the operator. this was not without problems though. The file got corrupted half-way through. In slide view, PPT would not change to another slide- none of the keyboard shortcuts would work. I still don't know what went wrong, as the pack'n'go refused to work as well. The workaround was to rebuild the presentation, from scratch without using cut & paste for fear of copying the corrupted part of the data. Though I could find nothing in the Visual Basic editor to cause concern. |
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I have to say how much
I enjoyed the experience of making this presentation. It involved
a lot of late night work at a time that clashed with school report
deadlines, but I got my reports in on time. |
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