GroupProject: Underwater

So we are currently working in our group project at Lost Boys.
We are doing a sort of trailer of an epic/sci-fi/action/thrilling movie. There's gonna be Aliens, explosions, spaceships, weapons, Army guys, SWAT guys... everything!
We are doing a lot of stuff, even acting!!! We are using a RED Epic camera and trying out some of its slow motion features and we are having a blast with it!

But, our course focuses mainly in VFX and CGI so we spend most of our time in front of the computers working a lot, because we are supposed to finish this project by next Friday (but I think we are gonna need a couple extra weeks though hehe)
I am working in 2 shots, one of them is an underwater scene with a submarine coming towards the camera and other shot where  an alien spaceship is going to the Earth to have some fun.
So for the submarine shots I am working with my classmate Krishna, he is doing all the effects and dynamics like bubbles explosions, implosions and so on. I'm just working on things like animation, lighting, and rendering of the submarine, the underwater environment, matte painting and comp of the shots. But since one of them has more effects we decided to work each of us on just one shot and maybe help each other sharing our skills.

 After setting up the lighting and render of the shot I decided to add some rocks to be able to play with the underwater atmosphere and create a better feeling of depth.
I liked that  idea but my render camera was animated, so that meant that I would have to project the matte painting on some geometry to create a nice feeling of parallax and volume.
But before doing that I decided to do some look development to see how this idea would support the shot, because sometimes, the idea might look cool but it doesn't support anything to the shot. Sometimes ideas just come to my mind, and they look cool inside my head but not on the final shot, and it really sucks to realize about that just AFTER you have done all the hard work.
So I just rendered out one frame and brought it to Photoshop.
As I said in previous post, I don't consider myself a concept artist, but I really love they work, and sometimes I try to learn some of their techniques to help myself to approach my goals.
I started suggesting the silhouette of some rocks and tried to keep the light as correct as possible.
I know is not a master piece, but it really convinced me to go with the idea of projecting some rocks to create a more interesting underwater environment. And it took me about 20 minutes.
I also added some filters of dust and play with volumetric effects. This helps me as a reminder of the things that I can do in comp later on.

I find very helpful to do some rough concept of your idea and check if its gonna work rather than go straight ahead and doing it. I might fail. It happened to me before because I didn't take that step, sometimes I'm very lazy... 
So take some time to do it, and if you have the chance, show it to some random people to get their opinions. The opinions of others always helps a lot, because they see your images with fresh eyes and they can tell very easily if what you are doing is working or not. It's the best way to learn and fix you mistakes.
I know I do make a lot of mistakes so please, if you have any comments, drop some lines!
I hope you found this post interesting.
Thank you so much for visiting my blog :)