Schematic

Sorry I realise how difficult the schematic is to understand... i just wanted to post the rough so that you guys could see! Will be cleaning it up on sunday. :) The princess drawings are just doodles I did at home after thinking about who the princess would be. It's really hard coming up with a colour scheme when I don't know who I'm designing for. We haven't discussed this yet.

scans

Sorry the scans are horrible.

These are bed designs I did at university today, with some of Alex's help towards the end. I think he has a really good eye for design. It's a shame he's not the concept artist! Anyway, we tried to work with the whole "pea" idea. The bed posts are shaped like pea pods, and in the final design that I cleaned up a little bit at the bottom, you can see a crown at the top of the bed, with a pea in the middle. The design was inspired by a picture of Charlottle LeBouef's room, in the Princess and the Frog art book I recently purchased.

Latest Colour Scheme

This was a challange! Mainly because I was tired and just wanted to sleep... I chose the colours based on the compliments Red and Green. Green being the accent colour, because the group decided we didn't want to go overboard with the pea idea, but we would use the green to hint at it.

Colour Inspiration

I got an awful lot of my inspiration for my colour palettes from just watching Disney films and taking in what sort of colours they used. It seemed to me we were heading in that direction. I looked specifically at films directed at girls, like Sleeping Beatuy, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, but mostly Beauty and the Beast. I was interested in the colours they used in Belle's room for that movie, and I wanted to explore a similar colour palette for our own environment.

I noticed the colour script artist on the movie used a lot of girly pastels for her room. As well as an analogous complementary colour palette, based on greens and violets.

Here are some of the screen shots I took while researching for this project.

Colour Exploration

Something I did once I got home today.

The mock up "colours through the day" is just an example. No final colours. The last one is just me messing around with colour and composition.

Princess Themed Colour Exploration

The Princess and the Pea

After a couple of days worth of brainstorming and talking things over, the group and I have finally decided to design a scene from The Princess and the Pea. Thankfully I'm still head of colour and lighting. :)



Art by Edmund Dulac

The Princess and the Pea is a short story written by Hans Christian Andersen. Here is a manuscript of it from eastoftheweb.com


The Princess and the Pea

Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess; but she would have to be a real princess. He travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were princesses enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones. There was always something about them that was not as it should be. So he came home again and was sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real princess.
One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents. Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.
It was a princess standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made her look. The water ran down from her hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real princess.
Well, we'll soon find that out, thought the old queen. But she said nothing, went into the bed-room, took all the bedding off the bedstead, and laid a pea on the bottom; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the pea, and then twenty eider-down beds on top of the mattresses.
On this the princess had to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.
"Oh, very badly!" said she. "I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It's horrible!"
Now they knew that she was a real princess because she had felt the pea right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds.
Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that.
So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the pea was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.
There, that is a true story.

Brainstorming.

After we met up on Tuesday the group decided we needed to start a fresh and try to come up with some more interesting ideas. So I suggested that we all go away and do some brainstorming. We all had to contribute five ideas to the group brainstorm, and by friday or so, decide which ideas out of the lot we thought could be interesting to look into further. Here are mine:

- A witches attic.
- The interior of a Yurt or Tepee. Inspired by the short film
Hugh we saw at Haff Animation Festival.
- A bath tub with toys floating on the water. (Inspired by Tara's bath idea).
- The entrance hallway to an enchanted palace.
- An travellers working desk.

HUGH (english subtitles) Student short movie from sylpaco on Vimeo.

Cinema Redux

A long time ago I found the coolest thing. It's called Cinema Redux. This is basically what it is:

"Created in January 2004, Cinema Redux explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time."


I'm glad I can finally use this technology to my advantage. Here are examples of what I did using Thumber, and some of my favourite visual movies.

The City of Ember



Amelie



Pride and Prejudice



Spirited Away

La Neige

For our project we're going with snow environments (...), so it's up to me to look up films with that kind of theme and research the colours that the visual artists on these projects have decided to use.

If I think off the top of my head, films with snow are usual all Christmas films, though not all. For example:

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
A Muppet Christmas Carol
Home Alone
Ice Age
Open Season
Night Before Christmas
Avalanche
Polar Express

Trailer Examples

My Jobs

I have been assigned "colourist" and "lighting artist" for this project. Thank God. It's what I think I can do well, and it's also something I have been considering as a future career. Colorist anyway. I will be using examples from Visual Development artist such as Lou Romano, Chris Turnham, Jeff Turley and Chris Appelhans in order to do this project to the best of my ability. I am a really big fan of all of their work.

Colourist - Simply put, the colorists job is to apply color to the scene.

3D Lighter - "Finesse the lighting on a shot and composite together the resulting character and environment renders into a final shot. " ref: Pixar.com

Examples of their work:

Lou Romano



Chris Turnham

The best website for this project, possibly ever?

ANIMATION BACKGROUNDS DOT BLOGSPOT DOT COM

You have been told.

Examples of what you'll find on this great site:

Layouts from the Black Cauldron.





Beauty and the Beast






Hercules






I almost forgot to say "and much, much more". For where would we be without that? I've got to say I really love the designs for the Aristocats and 101 Dalmations.

[EDIT]
So I've just had a good look around this blog and it appears this guy doesn't blog about 3D environment designs. But I don't think that matters. If you're looking for inspiration this is definitely a great place to start.

Tarzan!

Tarzan is my favourite Disney movie of all time... after Hercules. Something made me want to watch it today so that I had something to procrastinate with. I haven't finished watching it yet, but when I'm done I will be posting caps from some of the layout designs because they're absolutely stunning. It's a shame I am no don in Maya or I would have tried persuading my group that I could make some kind of jungle themed environment. But thinking about all those leaves and having to model them/copy and paste them just gives me a headache! Either way, I think the layout designs for that movie are wonderful. Incredibly inspirational!

Here is one I found on the net, just because I don't like posting without having pictures to show. =)

It's art from the Aristocats!

My Thoughts on this porject

Something I sent to Gregory and Alex regarding what I thought would make our layout succesful:

Enviroment

Questions we need to ask ourselves are:

- Where is this place set? A city, countryside, seaside resort, fairground, car park... what? And why? WHO, WHAT, WHERE and WHY are important things we probably should answer before we start getting into anything too deep. Feel free to brainstorm some ideas. I will do tomorrow. Oh and I wont be in tomorrow but I will be working, don't worry.

- Day/Night/Weather - That usually corresponds with what mood we are trying to convey. Is this a happy place? Do people go here to be peaceful? Or do people not go here at all? Is it holy ground? Or is it said that once a great evil had taken place in this very spot, a long time ago, and since, no one has dared to step foot there. You get the picture. Add some ideas!

- Buildings, again, are similar with what we're trying to say. At the end of the day looking at a piece of art (2D or 3D) is like picking up a book. It is there to tell a story. (this doesn't mean that we have to write a 1,000 word manuscript before we start working, but I'm just trying to say we need to understand what we are going to do before we try to do it). When the audience look at what we have made they are going to FEEL something. It is up to us to decide what we want them to feel. Do we want them to smile when they look at this place, or feel sad? Remorse? Anxiety? This will go with what building we choose to portray in this and how we depict it. If it's a church, it might be a church on a beautiful summers afternoon with it's bricks intact and its windows shining from the last time they were cleaned, or it could be half ruins with broken windows and graffiti on the walls. It's down to us to decide what story we're going to tell first. It's always about the story. From there the designs start getting thrown onto the table. EG: A sad, desolate ruined building isn't going to be lit with a beautifully warm orange key light, because the two give contrasting ideas to the audience.

Mon inspiration

Here are a few artists I've looked up to inspire me for this project:

Christophe Lautrette











Scott Caple












Chris Appelhans



Others include: Fred Craig, Massy Vincent and Edmund Liang.

Le Dossier

The Brief

This unit focuses on the development of students’ skills in environmental computer visualisation. Students begin to exploit the possibilities of animation within an environment to create a virtual setting to support dynamic character interaction.

Working in teams to simulate conventional animation industry workflow, students are introduced to the visualisation and creation of an environment in 3D using modelling, texturing and lighting techniques. They learn how to create and populate this environment with contextually appropriate assets, in a consistently defined and implemented visual aesthetic that is derived from their drawing and research into environments both actual and virtual.

The Unit aims:

• To introduce industrial, team based, animation workflows;
• To develop personal reflection upon individual contribution to group endeavour;
• To develop UV mapping and texturing skills;
• To develop the ability to generate considered and analytical visual responses to research.