TITLE: Rosebud NAME: Mike Sawyer COUNTRY: United States EMAIL: msawyer@callware.com WEBPAGE: http://www.itsnet.com/~stylus TOPIC: Childhood COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: rosebud.jpg ZIPFILE: rosebud.zip RENDERER USED: POV-RAY for Windows 3.02 TOOLS USED: no post-processing. PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro, and Illustrator for imagemap creation. RENDER TIME: ? HARDWARE USED: Pentium 100, 32 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This scene shows Charles Foster Kane's abandoned sled, "Rosebud," a metaphor for the childhood Mr. Kane left behind in the great movie "Citizen Kane." Sometimes the simple, basic things are those which we have the greatest yearning for. It's different for everyone. It might be a toy. Or your first car. Or a person. Or whatever. For Charles Kane, it was the favorite toy of his childhood. He left it behind as he began a life of wealth and power. Sad. But he found it again, if you recall--the fact that Rosebud was among Citizen Kane's belongings at the end of the movie indicated that, sometime in his life, he tracked it down and re-acquired it. So maybe he got back just a taste of his childhood. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Trivia: What was the name of the fancy new sled Charles got the very next Christmas, his first Christmas after leaving the boarding house? (He obviously wasn't very pleased with the thing.) For the answer, e-mail me at msawyer@callware.com. ----------- The sled used for the actual sledding scene in the film was made of pine. Look-alikes were made of balsa (I guess to help them burn quicker in the final scene). The pine sled was sold at auction in late 1996 for $233,500. Steven Spielberg owns one of the balsa versions. One thing we know for sure: nobody owns the sled that was burned up. ----------- No "Flexible Flyer" here--when Kane was a boy, the most famous _real_ sled of all time was still about twenty years away from production. ----------- The house, "Mrs. Kane's Boarding House," is a faithful reproduction of the movie's set. Take a look at the movie and see! The setting was supposed to be in Little Salem, Colorado. I kept it black and white to better reflect the period of the movie, allowing color only on the sled to help it stand out. Scene placement and most objects were modeled on a scale of one unit = one inch. The sled--hooo, boy. This was a lot of work. After slow-motioning my VCR a few times to get a general idea for the sled, I crafted the basic shape and structure of it. I wanted it to look worn & used, but not really beat-up, so with Differences I took chips out here & there. The VCR had its limitations, tho, as the movie recording was done at SLP on an old tape. I found what's gotta be the only color picture of Rosebud on the Internet at http://www.odysseygroup.com/coll397/auction.htm. This gave me the colors I was looking for, to help the sled stand out in the scene. But the picture was of the sled at an angle, so I couldn't just imagemap it onto my sled. An imagemap was absolutely necessary for this, as the level of detail needed for the sled just couldn't be done with POV. So, by hand & eyeball, I recreated the colors, shapes, & designs in Adobe Illustrator. That gave me a "perfect" picture of the sled, how it may have looked brand new. Then, in Adobe Photoshop, I placed the EPS image (which smoothed it some) and by hand I "weathered" and "aged" it. I realize some of the blemishes from the sled's picture on the Internet may have happened after the filming of the movie, but this color picture is the most accurate representation I could find, so I had to go by it. If you want to bother, compare the finished product with the picture I sketched it from (find the picture at the Internet address above). I think I came pretty dadburned close. One thing (actually two things) was missing from the original sled that was auctioned off--the metal runners that curled around the tips of each wood runner. The sled in this scene includes those. The font used for the text "Rosebud" is a Woodcuts font. The font used for the boarding house sign is Casablanca Antique. It was imagemapped onto a board. The footprints in the snow, the driveway, ruts, and snowy drifts are all height fields. The snow on the roof is mostly just boxes & cylinders, but placed carefully, so they have a nicely rounded & smooth effect. I wanted the sky to look "cold," so I thought of using a pale blue with white, whispy clouds, but I felt I should stick with black & white. The best way to convey a harsh, hostile, cold sky in black & white was to use bright white clouds contrasted starkly with an almost black sky. I really liked the effect, as it turned out. The wood pile is a bunch of wood cylinders with bark, different sizes, some split. I actually just made one log, then scaled its diameter for some logs and chopped ("differenced") some to show split wood. I like the effect. This is my first attempt at entering a POV image for competition, so be gentle PLEEEEEEZ.