Concept Designs
Ideas for the second scene. It mentions in the book The First Men in The Moon that there are caverns of crystals and fungi. 'At times the cleft narrowed so much that we could scarce squeeze into it, at others it expanded into great drusy cavities studded with prickly crystals, or thickly beset with dull, shining fungoid pimples.' (Wells, 1901:115)
These are exciting visualisations, Katy - but consider using your immediate foreground more - make me look past a crop of crystal shards, for example; drop another layer on top, and give it a go... but I look forward to seeing you move into colour too.
ReplyDeletealso - did you see this?
ReplyDeletehttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8466493.stm
I have seen it and I have put up some pictures of the giant crystals on my blog
ReplyDeleteoh yeah - oops!
ReplyDeleteInterim Online Review 09/11/10
ReplyDeleteHey Katy,
A solid body-of-work: good! I hope you saw the link I posted on your blog re. the long term production designer for the Star Trek franchise? I hope this has opened up a few interesting seams of research and further investigation. There's no secret to it, Katy - the more you read and learn about a subject, the easier it becomes to discuss it meaningfully.
Okay - much of the advice I've been giving today has come in the form of a reminder that, at the crit, one of the big questions I'll have to ask of students is "so, what's you visual concept?' Not only are you challenged with producing paintings of these spaces, you're also responsible for their production design too - and this is very important to grasp. Your influence maps are about a gathering together of textures, visual references etc., but they should also be being used to establish the 'rules' of your production; i.e. why your world looks the way it does? For some, the answer to this question might reside in the original text - there might be a particular description that they think sums up the world of the story entirely. It might be something about the world of the author - his own preoccupations and influences. It might also be another visual language that is somehow associated or congruent with the content of the book. For example, those students looking at Poe's short stories, have Gothic, Romanticism and Expressionism as possible aesthetics to combine with the geometries of their worlds,
You have sci-fi, of course - and remember that you're being asked to produce concept work for an ANIMATION - not a film, so realism is but one style among many. With your story, you have many fantastical elements - the plants, for example... Now what should they look? Yes, you need to make them up - but what principles are guiding you? What are you looking at? The point is this - you must avoid creating generic environments. In order to do that you must inject some STYLE - but STYLE comes from somewhere - it comes from your visual concept - the understanding of your world.
ReplyDeleteAs you move into colour and as you continue to refine your environments, I'll be looking for evidence that you're working as a production designer too.