The animatic has finally reached a point that im happy with so its now time to move onto concepts :) At this stage in the project I am the only 3rd year pre production concept artist working on this film and with so many modellers working on the project i am immediately under pressure to produce concepts quickly as it has started to get to the stage that the modellers are modelling things such as buildings and vehicles from photo reference and trying themselves to change it to the style im going for but not achieving the look i want. so its been a struggle to keep everyone going in the same art direction but now i have time to create some concepts it is starting to look more like what i had initially imagined. Anyway here are the concepts so far with much more to come.
I did this concept at the very beginning of the project but i have forgot to show it of. but here she is the bookshop owner who is one of the main characters in the film.
The Interior of the Bookshop
The missing wall that The camera is looking from in the previous concept.
Boots For The Body
The Interior of the flat where the body and head live which is situated opposite the bookshop.
Its been a while since I posted about the Headless project and a lot has happened.
Being the director and art director on this project i have had a lot of work to do and have found myself telling people what to do more than working specifically on anything. Of course the main role of the director and art director is to keep everything looking the way that i want it and for the story to say what i want it to say and being caught up in doing the animatic and storyboard constantly i have done the character designs quickly in order to get the characters modelled so they can then be rigged. But it wasn't until i looked back on my original designs that i realised the 3d models didn't look anything like the original concepts i created.
here is the turnaround i did for the head.
And a few stills of the 3D Model in progress Created by Alan Ation
then the finalised 3D Turnaround of the head.
After looking at these for a while thinking there was something not right about the character i realised that they where far from the original concept that i did myself. Just being caught up in doing everything else i missed over the important aspects of my original design which i liked so much. So i went back and studied my original concept thoroughly.
Looking at this and having it stuck to the side of my monitor i soon realised what was missing in my first head character turnaround. It was the small things like the positioning of the eyes, ears,mouth and nose. The shape of the ears and how square they are, the shape and size of the eyes and so on.
To gett a better idea of how this concept to be created in 3d i got my hands on some clay and created this head character as a real 3d object that i could continue to look at for reference and understand more how it could work.
Although This was a very quick clay sculpt i was happy with the outcome and it helped me see where i went wrong and how it could be fixed.
The next stage i took was to re create this clay sculpt in Mudbox as a 3d sculpt that I could refine even more.
This Sculpt was simple but achieved the more innocent and charming character that i was going for and as you can see from the old and new next together the change made a difference and is now more like my original design.
Before i Pitched This as an idea i spent a long time refining what style i wanted it to be in, i had the style in my head and eventually got it down on paper.
the style is a mixture of artists work that i have seen but all with this similar look using pastel colours with an edgy painterly look to it.
Style reference.
So After studying images like the ones above I re did some of my old concepts and tried to get this style in there. I Have see this style a lot now i have been looking for it but im hoping that taking reference from a combination of them and creating this in 3D with give it a slightly more original take on it.
Here is all the concepts so Far for headless all created by me.
Concept art is something that I have always loved doing and is something I wish to do a lot for this film. But being the director and sorting the story out at the same time is making it difficult to create the concepts along side all the other work. The concepts are a key thing to have so modellers can then create the stuff in 3D and keep to the style but at the moment the modellers are quicker at doing the work than there is concepts being produced so I have started to recruit extra concept artists and am still looking for more.
Flat design
A key part to the story is figuring out how everything is going to work in 3D and how things are going to work together in a way that the story makes sense within the environment. The flat interior was one of those environments that had to be right and fit with the style, i didn't have the time to design this so i got a second year on board
Katie Wyman, who is brilliant at concept work and i asked her to design the interior of the flat, at this stage it was just a plan to get an idea of where everything would happen.
I gave her information about what was going to happen in the story and what we would need where and this was the result.
it may not seem like much at the moment but i was very pleased with it as it all works perfectly and fits with everything around the story that will take place in the apartment.
Its been a while since my last blog post so here is an update on everything.
My Pitch for the short film headless was successfully and is now in the making!
After I was told that my film was chosen to go through me and Toby Ellis started to think about who we would need on are project and started recruiting a team. Being one of the only 3D films that was chosen i had the opportunity to have some very talented 3D people working on this film.
I have taken the place as director and art director working mainly on the story so for but also over seeing how everything is looking doing concepts and will eventually be doing alot of texture work as this is something im keen to get into.
The Team
Me : Director/Art Director
Toby Ellis: Co-Director, head modeller, texture artist
so that's the core team so far who are all very talented and are doing a brilliant job in there roles so far, being a big job to create a short 3d animation within this amount of time the people who work on this project will grow more and more when different jobs need to be done.
