To begin this scene I studied the brief, and allowed myself to start developing ideas which I could further into a beautiful finished project. We were given a small audio file which had a very upbeat jingle to it, this gave me very positive and uplifting feelings which I wanted to try and capture in this utopian world. I wanted to create a scene which was dreamy and peaceful, a place in my mind which allows me to relax. The project was all about young creatives designing something in their own style, software and imagination. 

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Once I had come up with the idea of creating a realistic landscape, with mountains in the distance, birds flying through the sky and a huge lake rippling in the wind. I began researching for inspiration online, I made sure to always reference real photography to get something which was accurate within my animation. I started by blocking out the composition and focusing on the background elements. I used a Hdri for the realistic lighting and managed to model the mountains using a displacement map and high resolution textures. The ground was simple as it was mostly going to be covered to I sculpted the land to fit the image I had in mind, I then created the realistic water texture procedurally using a tutorial I found online. Then I downloaded the trees, grass, shrubs and flowers which I created particle systems for. With weight painting I was able to control the amount of each asset in an area this gave my a lot more freedom and precise placement. Finally once I had the overall design finished I added in some volumetric haze for that morning fog and gave it a warm colour to emphasis the feeling of paradise. 

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For the animation I added a simple movement to the camera so that it would zoom into the scene. Then using rigging I was able to animate the bird flying and repeatedly flapping its wings, this was quite challenging but I was able to watch a video and figured it out in the end. For the stone skimming along the water I was able to keyframe the movement and then use the graph editor to give it more of a fluid motion as it skims along the water. Creating the ripples was very challenging but there are modifiers you can use in Blender to achieve this. And finally I did some simple compositing to colour grade the entire scene, and add some chromatic aberration in post. 

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At a later date I went back to the scene and added some more surreal elements to create something more futuristic. I added in these glowing beams of light and a moving object floating above the water. This was for fun as I really like creating a realistic scene and then bringing in some abstract design to it and seeing how much I can change the atmosphere. 

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Below are some screenshots to show the progression of the scene.