This year at the yearly Adobe Max conference, Lee Hirsch, a documentary filmmaker, talked about his documentary "Bully" and the "Bully Project" that he started. His talk at the second day keynote was moving and inspiring. During the talk, Lee announced a new initiative, called the Bully Project Mural.

 

Quoting from the site:

 

 

At the conference, Lee asked all the attendees who felt they had been bullied to stand. Later, he also asked all the attendees who felt they had part taken in bullying to stand as well. The whole audience stood in both cases, which I thought was a great reminder of the vulnerability in each of us, at some point or through our lives, and the cruelty, lack of empathy, kindness or awareness we can all be guilty of.

 

So for this week's project, I reflected on what bullying meant to me. 

 

Thinking back to my childhood, I remembered the fear and helplessness that school could instill in me, especially when I was very young. Whether rational or not, fear and helplessness is what I did feel at times and bullying makes this kind of feeling worse. So I decided to try and put these feelings in picture. 

 

I was inspired by this photograph of a shark. The font and hand graphic come from the Project Bully graphics toolkit. The shark and the fish models come from TurboSquid, and I tinkered with the shark model quite a bit to get the look I wanted (also, the three sharks are slightly different).

 

The technique I used for the lighting is pretty simple and is nicely explained in this video. It essentially uses volumetric, visible light and the rays of light and made by blocking light with beams (above the sharks) and with the sharks themselves, as shown below.

 

While most of the rendering is done in Cinema4D, I do final compositing in Photoshop (CC) to tweak lighting and texturing on the scenes.