Sunset Scene Test

The sunset scene was the scene that inspired the rest of my story, and it's the climax of the short, so I wanted to get an exact idea of how it would work before I started any background painting for it. The idea is to have Beram reach the top of the hill and see his castle and be happy that he made it, however as the sun sets it reveals that the castle is actually on fire and that his home, along with his daughter is destroyed. The idea is to have the sun hide that the castle is on fire, and it going down would slowly reveal the fact.

If I couldn't get this to work, I could try a couple of different things that would have the same effect but be less impressive:

• Have the castle on the left and the sun on the right, but the sun is so bright that it overexposes the castle so you barely see it. As the sun sets, the light becomes less strong and you see its on fire.
• Use blurs to obsucre the castle's details so you wouldn't be able to see it properly
• Have the castle silhouetted through a cloud, and the cloud would reveal the castle on fire

I decided to do the test for the original idea first:

I made a quick mockup of the assets (so it isn't meant to look great at the moment), and then used after effects to composite it. I'm pretty pleased with it, and I think I can use this idea, I just have to be very precise when making this scene's background. To make this scene, I basically had two different versions of the background - one for when the sun is up, one for the when its fully set. I then animated the opacity as to slowly reveal the second one over the top of the first. In addition to this, I animated a curves layer which would darken the overrall image to help sell it. The fire on the castle is done in the exact same way, however in the actual scene I'll change it up and make it look more convincing.

After showing this to some people, and reviewing it myself, here's the changes I need to make:

• I need to make it more obvious that the castle is on fire rather than just glowing. I could do this by painting flames for the actual asset, as well as by adding smoke coming off the casttle
• The clouds need to be changed and made much larger, as well as move slower. To get the lighting on them to change, they could be behind an overlay layer so that changing will affect the cloud's lighting as well
• The sun is setting a bit too fast