Weeks one and two!!

Week one:

Today we watched some dvd's. One was on thumbnails- we were shown how Value (the depth between blacks and whites) is the best way of getting your ideas down on paper and can be used to form the picture before defining objects and then sketching the larger version.

Mark briefly talked about The World Of The Dark Crystal concept design book which was very interesting (I really like looking at concept designs from movies) we were explained how designs for production should not just be random but researched thoroughly. An example was the mathematical formula used in The Dark Crystal.

We were told that when designing it is important to have something that the audience can relate to. For example an office environment set in the future could still have rows of desks, coffee and smartly dressed office people sitting and looking busy. The building design or computer equipment might be something we don't recognise but we can still connect these other small things with an office environment.

We talked about Character Development: When developing a character always first consider their; past, present, future, beliefs, habits, likes, dislikes, age, gender, nationality, era, ect.

In general people can be classed into three main groups. Ecomorph (small bone structure, tall, long arms, flat chest), Endomorph (soft body, large bones, slow metabolism, round face,wide hips, short neck) and Mesomorph (hard body, thick neck, large chest, strong, gain and loose weight easily). When designing a character consider which group(s) they fit into.

At the end of the lesson our task was to take the Inn scene from the Grimm's Fairy Tale The Three Surgeons and research the period, architecture, food and living conditions of the time and then draw 5 or more thumbnails as well as one finished concept design from one of the thumbnail to be handed in by next Wednesday.

Ps, Mark might want to know that a few of us are having trouble getting onto the course content link?



Week two:


We watched a dvd featuring an insane freak drawing a city landscape scene using Photoshop which made me feel slightly sick it was that good! At the same time though I really enjoy watching artists create their art starting from scratch and forming something amazing, it always inspires me to practice more. I think the main purpose of this dvd was to reinforce some of the things we learnt last year including the 'Golden Section' rule which is that you should always place the horizon line off centre thus creating a more interesting and effective perspective drawing. It also demonstrated how the artist began his artwork- he put down the large blocks of colour first and slowly built the painting up before dealing with smaller details such as buildings, shadows ect..

In the tutorial we handed in our Inn Assignments. I'm really excited about the Grimm's Fairy Tale Assignment we have coming up. We were told that we would be working in groups which should be interesting. The Inn assignment was good practice for researching (an essential part of any pre-production design).




This is my finished concept piece, however Mark liked the one below better because it has a more interesting design and tells the viewer everything they need to know. I think that the one above is a little too centred and straight. The very bottom picture is an example of a cleaned up thumbnail and the research i did to form it.




At the end of the lesson we were given the task of a script breakdown (for the movie Strangers on a plane) and shot breakdown (Slither). These are used in preparation for concept art and story boarding.
We were told some terminology for shots (ie- L/S (long shot), Extreme L/S, POV (point of view), OS (as in peeping toms or detectives- ppl watching from a hidden spot), Dutch angle (horizon line tilted ect..
We were also given an address for an internet script database www.imsdb.com that can help us for our first assignment.

At the moment i am having trouble getting the powerpoint of L@G to see the right colours i need as well as the rest of camera shot terminology. .

When editing a film always be aware of Tempo in relation to where the scene should be cut. Sound is a very effective way of connecting different scenes whether it be off screen sound (atmos) or overlapping sound. Other methods such as the 180 degree rule are also good to remember.

Last but not least we were asked to make a Blogg to document what we have learnt, what we enjoyed, and what we didn't understand, sooooooo here it is :)