Film backgrounds

Worked my butt off to make backgrounds for my film. Here's about half of them.

a little preview of what's to come

These are some boards from my film, one for each shot. Right now my film is a little over 90 seconds in 20 shots. I'm really digging the pacing of it though, and I just started keying out all my shots two nights ago.

What I have in mind is not too different than these boards; everything will be an overall greyscale, with slight tints, mostly blue. I'm considering saturating the color for the more climatic shots, but we shall see if that's necessary. I'm still trying to uphold the things I picked up from those film thumbnail studies I did.

designs for film

Early postman design

Mail cart ideas

Early werewolf design

Early dog designs

Final postman model & colors

rough postman model sheet

rough werewolf model sheet

postman & werewolf comparison sheet

First film post!

So I'm finally working on my first CalARTS film! I've been working on it since winter break, so I'm definitely behind on blogging about it.

Short story shorter, my approx. 90 second short is about a postman who encounters a mean dog on his mail run, and soon transforms into a werewolf. It was easy boarding everything prior to the transformation, but then I found myself having trouble coming up with a dramatic, yet extremely brief transformation sequence. I decided to hit the books (or rather the Youtube) in search of clips from various werewolf movies as to get some ideas for how I'd want my film to look and feel, especially at that one moment.

Here are the shot studies I did, and I sure learned a lot from that one week! If I could, I'd spend all my time just boarding and thumb-nailing movie sequences to steal some great ideas.

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Silver Bullet (1985)

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)

The Company of Wolves (1984)

Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

angel painting (final)

I would have to say that this is the first oil painting I've done completely outside of school, especially since I was introduced to oils in my second year of high school. Clearly I need to practice; I would describe my handle on oil paints as "clumsy" at best.

This is how the final painting turned out. (I will post a better quality picture this weekend.) Click here to see its chronicled progress.

angel painting (continued)

Here is the progress from today. After the washes from yesterday had dried, I laid in the thick paint. I felt that the texture thing was really just a cop-out, so I painted into the background. I also fixed the leg and reshaped the wings.

angel painting (continued)

Yeesh, it's been nearly as week since my last post. : [

Today I played around some more with angel painting ideas, this time actually using reference.

But in the end, I finally decided on using this pose and composition:

 

I began the painting with a rough outline in red oil paint and a thin layer of various colors to block the shapes. I think I've forgotten how to paint correctly.

I then began to apply thicker layers and refined the edges of the figure by scraping the yellow background. Scraping also gave this texture that I found interesting, so I believe I'll keep it this way. (I apologize for the poor image quality.)

I'll be continuing this painting over the next two days.