I am working on a project as a member of Team Beth. We are making a book trailer based on "Snow white and Red Rose", which is one of many short stories by Grimm brothers. During the weekend, I found several images that we could visually refer to.
Above images gave me some ideas of how we could approach the costumes of our two main characters. But now i am a bit worried about how we are going to bring a bears and a dwarf into life.
For this big project, we have about five weeks and 15 people are in a team to make it happen. We have many students who are from different majors, and this is good because this will give as many different point of views and allow us to improve the products. Also, it would be not easy for a group of people in a same major to come up with something out of their comfort zone. I think we need a collaboration of different experiences in order to make an interactive product, whether it is a video or an exhibition. For example, it would be difficult for fashion major students to master Maya or Adobe Flash in 5 weeks. But we have animation students who could handle such programs, so instead, fashion major students could work on the costumes of the characters. Currently, from what I remember from last week, more than half of the students in the class are video and photography major. And this gave me a rough idea of what I want to do.
I was inspired by short videos of paper-doll animations I watched recently.
(not 100% sure if they used paper doll for this one, but I enjoy the character designs and atmosphere)
But I thought that these are too complicated to accomplish in 5 weeks.
And I found this animation, which I liked much yet seemed less painful.
I liked how simple collections of black Shillouettes of characters move, while the simply colored background gives the sense of time and atmosphere.
I thought it is good idea to make a stop-motion paper-animation because the less digital we go, the more we could collaborate. I like designing characters and environments. Therefore if this proposal chosen, I look forward to work on shapes of characters or the background as an Art director. The story is going to be based on can give learning and lessons. A tweaked version of Aesop's fables or a short story from Talmud would be a great choice considering the amount of time we have.
I did a very rough sketch of how I would want the characters and background to feel like.
At the end, I ended up changing more colors to my pallets. I was looking at variety of art works by pixar, and inspired by their usage of colors. So, based on the pallet I've already selected I added few more colors to strengthen the contrast between the cool and warm light.
This is the final design of the cargo ship. This ship functions as a passenger ship as well.
A hover bike design inspired by Darren's concept arts. Darren designed a lot of hover craft vehicle and not only did I liked the design of it but I also liked the how colorful they are.
Throughout the project, I tried to use different painting styles. For most of time, I use glazing technique, which is doing a value structure first and then adding colors on top of it. But this tends to make the picture grayish over all. Also I got tired of catching up with little details while I do glazing, which I eventually have to go back and refine with colors again. So I decided to put colors right on top of the sketch for this painting. I am happy with it. Also it was a good test to try new brushes I made.
Through the week, I spend my time finalizing the three vehicle designs. It was not easy to pick just three from so many sketches. From the beginning of the project, I thought about making small-medium-big size vehicles, so I choose the best sketch I liked for each classes.
This is a dump truck design, which moves by jet engines placed on the right and left. I liked the idea, at the first time, but soon decided not to go with this, since a truck design was already done by Darren. And I could not help myself not to refer to Darren's work unconsciously.
So I decided to design a airplane -type vehicle, which functions as a traders' ship.
A motorcycle design was something I had in mind but, was more complicated than the other two.
For my medium size vehicle, I went back to the idea of racing car, and tried something more organic, such as as shape of a slug.
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