STYLE
- Abigail Lamb
- Dec 6, 2016
- 8 min read
To get the ball rolling at the beginning of this project I just decided to collect together as many images as I possibly could that would help inform my thinking. With so much to think about I thought it would be a good iea to put all that thinking in one place. Here are the boards I collected together. Accompanying each are the virtual versions of the boards, located on my pinterest. Eventually I had too many images to create boards like these. I'll elaborate on each section of the film below.
STOP MOTION BOARD
When I first thought about this project I always thought I wanted to make a stop motion film. I love stop motion and I feel like I work best when I make a stop motion film. So when I began this project I was looking rather heavily at stop motion. I like the kind of stop motion that is playful with it's material choices. I like cotton wool in a stop motion quite a lot. So this board includes a time where peter vacs used it in a james music video. In addition I looked at previous graduate Anna Ginsberg's film how can you swallow so much sleep. Aside from stop motion films I looked at animated films that have moons or spaceman in them. La luna, A trip to the moon, noodle.
I had to seriously think about my stop motion decision at the beginning of November, having completed a full month of inktober sketches. People had gotten so used to seeing Lute as a flat and 2 dimmensional character that the feedback coming in suggested people connected with him like that and wanted him like that. I became pretty torn about the medium I had chosen. I had no real reason for it at that point other than I worked well like that, thought I could comfortably animate a puppet for an extended period of time without getting bored or frustrated. However the aim of this film was emotion connection, if my audience were connected with Lute as a 2D character was changing him going to do me any favours? Or would it be much like that dreaded moment they remake your favourite 80's film? Yeah sure it's ok but it's not the original. I put a lot of thought into the stop motion idea after that.
It was a comment from Kate at the external pitch that got helped me almost definitevely decide. She said to me that it was a pretty emotion and delicate little film and that stop motion would really lend itself to that style of film. Giving it a texture and depth. She also said that she thought a physical puppet would help to ground lute. I felt that the grounding element was very important. He is a spaceman so gravity is important, especially to Lute. He's stuck on this tiny planet that doesn't even look like it should have anough gravity to keep him there, but yet there he is. So if the animation was to look as though he wasn't grounded thenI would worry the audience would not believe the story. It only takes a small thing to ruin the entire fidelity of the world I've build. I wanted Lute to feel grounded. He is stuck in so many ways.
I've made some models. Some physical versions of Lute. He's still adorable as a model. I modeled a couple of different versions of his head as well. Two out of three of those models are physical and the last is a maya model. I'm still working on it though so there is only a screenshot in the above gallery. I was having way too much fun with maya. Too see more about these models please redirect here.
SETTING STYLE SHEET
So this is the first style consideration for my film. I know I enjoy and work best with bold pink colours. I don't know what it is about the colour pink that works for me, but I'm hugely attracted to the colour and I feel like it creates a bold aesthetic in my films. So I looked a lot at the pinker cosmos' and bits of space. I also took a look at the physical versions manifestations of cosmos' and galaxies which are the two clouds at the bottom right of the image.
After this I spent some time creating my own images in the form of concept art. I had a play around with a lot of styles and came to realise that although I thought I knew what I wanted the backgrounds to look like - Bright, fluffy, vulumptious clouds. Billowing all over the place, haphazzardly and all comfy in appearance. I decided after producing these images I was much more drawn to something flatter, more geometric. Still bold and with a lot of colour but just not the same thing I went in thinking.
The first image above is one I am particularly enamered by. I really love the contrast and the way the stars really stick out from the whole thing. Considering how much I want the skyline to tantalise Lute, I feel like that imagery is so striking that you can't help but look at it.
The next image I was working with something a bit more cloud like. I love the idea of the particles floating delicately through the air and in this artwork I have included them. I think I would still like to include them and at very least I would like to test them in an animation. I have been given some good tutorials on after effects particles by Will Pietch so I'll be checking those out at some point. This image still has a lot of that bold colour that I love but it's a lot softer and richer than the image before it. This image is far closer in appearance than the original plan for the scenery. I I personally amn't sure I like it too much. I think it could get to confusing and pretty distracting if I were to animate it like I had planned. I might consider test animating it but it's will depend on how the other tests fo.
The next one I have repeatedly been told resembles the death star... It is not the death star. I like this one too. It's kind of a middle ground between the first and second images. I love the stars in this one again and I composed the atmospheric clouds so that they may carry a lot of texture. It turned out pretty nice but I'm still not as drawn to it as I am to the first one. I wonder if it's becasue I added blue. I wanted to try making it look a bit more like the real night sky does however I think I prefer the implications of having cosmos being the only thing in colour. It really does help to place the emphasis on it. And by doing that we stress not only it's importance (which helps with foreshadowing) but also helps to stress Lute's want to desire to no longer be stuck on the planet. Nothing on that planet is in colour.
The final is a highly colourful and really fluffy concept I made purely to see where the colour boundaries are for me. I think I hit them. I really really do. I like this piece of art. But it is purely conceptual, I have absolutely no intention of continuing I that style. It's time consuming, it's busy, it's distracting and just a bit childish as well. It's not that kind of film. There needs to be some seriousness to it, some depth that I just don't feel like you get with an image like this. It is fun for some concepts though.
ASTRONAUT REFERENCE BOARD
I had no idea what kind of astronaut I wanted when I started thinking about him. I always thought I wanted him to be a much more red and old-fashioned style astronaut. However when I actually got to drawing I found that I just liked him however I was drawing him. My designs are bordering the above image. I think I found that the more feminine shape character wasn't as likable as the other characters. Although I knew I wanted a relatable charater so I wanted to make him soft and round and approachable. This was important to his over all silhouette because you were never going to see his face. I had to make sure all his character design traits came from there. Once again if you want to see more on lute's development please click here.
FURTHER INSPIRATION
Some of my references are from other places. Physical things that I came across. So I'm going to put them below.
The three similar images are by an amazing illustrator that I completely love, Chris Baldie. These are from a series of 1-4 panel comics from a tiny book called "It's Dark Out Here." I recently met Chris and bought this book fro him at the edinburgh comic festival at summerhall. He had a lot of astronaut content so I bought a good few things. While I love his bigger comic series "Space Captian" as well, there was something about the simplicity of these comics and the nature of what he does with that simplicity that really captured me. I think I can learn a lot from him.
The black and white image is a panel from Mr Clement's "The Gorgeous Harbour" Which Jared lent me. It doesn't have much to do with space but there is a rabbit in a space suit. It's a really nice piece of character design. It's to do with him feeling isolated. I didn't even question why he was in a space suit. It didn't even need it. But he has this adorable and simplistic face. The same way Lute does.
Then I took some time to look at some more commercial narratives set in space about isolated characters. Wall-e and the Little Prince are two of those considerations. I keep being told that the small planet in my film is a likeness of the little prince so for obvious reasons I am bearing that in mind. Wall-e shares a lot in common with Lute. They're both alone in space, both incapable of making much noise even if they had someone to communicate with and they both just want simple things in life. Wall-e I feel will help to guide me a lot when it comes to the soundtracking and the foley. I mean granted partial aim of my film is to have more realistic foley than wall-e will have, but Wall-e did break ground by being the first feature length in a long time to be mostly silent. Or at least without speaking.
The environemntal image I have included in this gallery is a piece illustrated by my friend Susan Elizabeth Ball. I have always loved th way her colour palets merge. She has a very beautiful grasp of gradient tools and that was something I wanted to at least try mimicing. There's something so natural and light and hopeful about her colour pallet and I wanted to try recreating it in some way for this film. Mostly because that sense of hope is really important to Lute's character. He's persistant and hopeful.
The astronaut is an illustration by another one of my favourite illustrators, Pollomuerto. I chose to save it because of his roundness. He's soft and unthreatening. Like Lute would be.
And lastly I have included a design sheet or the character of emotional baggage from the film "Fallin' Ffloyd". Mainly because every time I watch this film I know that emotional baggage isn't a good character or good characters but those big shiney eyes make me feel for him everytime. It's a simple warm character desing for something so negative and it just goes to reinforce the struggles we all face with emotional baggage. But above all it's a testimone to the effectiveness of a bright eyes and rounded design.
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