Animated Narratives Week 10 | Lighting – The Spire

Following the theme of Light, I constructed a scene from my short film script that vaguely suggests an alien landscape, so I wanted it to have as much stylisation as possible and still be readable. 

With a limited colour palette and backlighting that is interpreted through colour ramp nodes in Blender, I have sort to create a scene that feels surreal and thick with atmosphere, a place where the majority the landscape is in shadow, its shapes only hinted at. 

I took inspiration from the anime film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000, Directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri), a feature that is drenched in a heavy gothic aesthetic with a lot of silhouetting and backlighting that crafts a cohesive and rich lighting scheme throughout.

To create the scene, I had to teach myself procedural surface texturing and modelling for objects like oceans, mountains and rock surfaces, and to push my ability to capture a sense of distance through lighting and atmospherics (The scene is quite small).