This week was the week were we worked on art direction. Bianca already has some great concepts for the main girl character in the story. Since she started working on characters, I decided to work on market place concepts. It is a small portion of the film but I do feel that it is quite important, as well as concepts for the home and general village.
I finished the sketch I had of the marketplace then moved onto new sketches of a home interior and concepts of children. Since this is a rural village most of the buildings are going to look the same and have the same feel to them. We are making them modular, so that we aren't trying to base an entire village off of some sketches. We will have a layout but it will remain relativley simple.
So, I went to work. We are getting closer to pin-pointing the exact style we are going for. We haven't yet discussed what methods we are going to be using to keep up that consistency. We have a few references that Krisyln put togther that defietly show where we are headed style-wise.
As you can see here we are going for more of a painted on style. Blocky, graphic, and stricking. Its not included but we also discussed using references from Arcane's style. I don't want to get too in depth since we haven't finalized a design.
I won't lie, right about here is where I get insanely distracted and start doing research on the "Roc." Here is some information on the Roc below.
Since it is a myth, there's not much to base the bird off of. We have a few Sinbad movies (one thats also animated!) from time to time but none of them really capture a terrifying bird. Most are just giant eagles or hawks. Which, scientifically makes sense due to, at the time, prehistoric birds were still roaming the Earth. Those being an Elephant bird and the Moa respectively.
With that in mind I went looking for time when creatives just made up a design for the bird.
Here we have two refernces from video games of all places. So, the top two images are from the Legend of Zelda. The roc or the Helmaroc King, is a reoccuring antagnist in the series. The bottom two are the Roc from Xenoblade Chronicles 2. These two references are very different from each other. There is almost no similarities in them but it is a starting point. Something I feel that is important is using Middle Eastern and West Asian styles to push our design. Patterns are super SUPER important when it comes to design something of that nature.
So I worked on research on textiles in the region. (Side point, the textiles and patterns are also being used for character design.) I found this really amazing website on the craft and handmaking traditions in Bangladesh.
We have now sort of come full circle. The textiles industry is also important to the marketplace life. As seen in the websites images, it's definetly a large part of the industry. When it comes to style, they are patterned and handcrafted. They make the streets colorful and bright, full of life alongside the brightly colored fruits and vegtables.
There are, however, some very dark sides and realities to that industry. Which should be discussed, but it is not our main focus for this film. I found some sources that speak about it more in-depth here:
We are definetly moving forward! I am finishing a few more skecthes and concepts and I believe we are going to start moving into Maya.
See ya l8r sk8r!
JR
