Martin Day

Tribute to Firtz Lang's "Metropolis"






Good luck ladies and gentlemen.

Attached Images

Martin Day - FINAL #2.jpg (169.9 KB, 579 views)

hbetter

I like the image very much, the usage of light and tones. My only criticism is that the aesthetic is not transformed and your creativity as the author does not come forward. It relies on past genres. The rendering is too grainy.

matthewbannister

Great, you have achieved your goal. The composition is good but is it borrowed from Fritz?

ehanson

I know the original image well, and this tower feels too top-heavy to me. The sense of light is good, however, all of the modeling edges could be chamfered to provide lighting highlight kickers.

Arnold Gallardo

It is a good attempt at simulating Art Deco posters of the 20's and it surely is evocative of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. However one is remidned of an old dictum in Art that 'you only imitate to surpass'. In this aspect this image falls short. It is too derivative to be evaluated on it own merit. The stark simplicity of the modeling and texturing is correct for the pusposes of this illustration. The contest however is not a 'graphic arts' contest but an arch-vis exterior. In this requirement, it also fails.

The sense and direction of lighting however is proper as well as the placement of the elements on the scene is wonderful specially the biplanes. it is a bit grainy as commented and can benefit from being a cleaner.

One wonderd influence and possibly your passion towards this classic movie was the one that dominated your direction in this contest instead of your own creativity and personal aesthetics which is evident in every image and rendering one does. This is not something that's easy to do, this is why when evaluating demo reels if one sees a cliche an effort is seen if the artist tried to make this image their own or not even if it is derived.

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Arnold Gallardo
Visual Content Creator
Technical Writer

Author:'3D Lighting: History,Concepts
and Techniques'

Lon

It's nice that you captured multiple levels of detail, which is often the case when cg imagery tries to mimic past works. The building in the distance lacks any horizontals to give it scale. And the verticals are all varying in size and different from the rest of the buildings, that it seems removed from the rest of the scene.

The graininess is understandable, but there's a fine line before it becomes too much.

I would advise taking the next challenge as an opportunity to venture forward and not repeat an homage.

Ernest Burden

You have gone beyond using a classical piece as a model, and gone most of the way to simply re-creating an image in a new medium. There is a long history of studying art by copying another piece, and I suppose that is what you've done. I am bothered by it. I think you should have interpreted the Metropolis concept more. This is too literal, and in being so, shows how the movie is still better.

More than anything else, you miss out on the vague nature of the grainy film images of the film (1927) and the stark contrast of the film stock they used. The grain and model-shot-closeup of the film allow you to fill in some of the idea, where your rendering is sharp enough to make a point of its simplicity of surface. You could have used some careful edge blurring, maybe motion blurring, to accomplish this without introducing grain. The planes and foreground train should be fairly motion blurred. The point is not that they are there, its that they are going somewhere.

The lighting, while dramatic, is not contrasy enough in middle to foreground. The tower is fine as the lower contrast implies distance. There are no whites and no blacks, and any selfrespecting black and white picture should have at least a little of both. Extreme dark at the bottom grounds the scene since there is no ground visible, and allows the elevated roadways and rails to pop. Probably the most sucessful building in the scene is the left setback one, it has a strong range of values, detail in parts and obscured in others, it accepts shadows from other structures teling us they are actually in the same place.

The cars are really well placed. They are proceeding like sheep. I think the clouds are too strong, but how they place dark and light areas to help show the tower is effective.

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Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering