Blackwater Village | Project Breakdown
- Savannah Edwards
- Aug 23, 2019
- 5 min read
Deep in a labyrinthine underwater cave system, there lies an elusive, ancient settlement of cave "mer people"... Akna sits on the drop off by the nests of the giant prehistoric dunkleosteus fish. As the giant creatures swim by, she sits unfazed, deep in thought of her last day in Blackwater....
See: Lookbook
In the world builder's project, we were required to communicate the mood and tone of a world in a single shot. Below is the breakdown the workflow that took place to achieve this:
Workflow breakdown
1. Brainstorming and Planning: After hearing about the project I already had an idea of what I wanted to do in mind, moreover I was very comfortable with the methods I was going to be using to animate. So going through the motions of a project plan, trello board and writing the idea into the register was easy enough.
2. Building a world: With a world in mind I quickly answered the prompts about the environment, people, culture and creatures. It's important to establish the whole lore, environment and peoples of a world set in stone in order to have a consistent story ad you don't want to leave chances for gaps and holes. I found it helpful to look into various other cultures, time periods and civilisations to take inspiration from their architecture, clothing and religious beliefs.
3. Mood-boards & Reference Material: My "bluesky mood-board" became my reference material as I was very picky and had a clear vision in mind of what I wanted this world to look and be like.
4. Composition thumbnails: Although I should have done 2 thorough rounds of this, I only managed to squeeze out the grand total of 10 thumbnails as I found myself settling on a thumbnail rather quickly in my 2nd round.
6. Deciding on a thumbnail: After careful consideration and a few discussions I settled on this thumbnail (above).
5. Designing characters and creatures: Probably my favourite part of this project was painting the character art. Although she had her back facing toward us I wanted to make sure I knew what she looked like fully fleshed out and in her element.
5. Colour keys: I found colour keys to be a both challenging but fun part of this project as I did not want to randomly filter over colours that did not suit the scene whatsoever. I wanted to make keys that would convey the mood of the scene effectively
6. Final design iteration / Style frame: The final design iteration was helpful in the way that it killed two birds of this project with one stone. This gave me the most time consuming of my environmental and lighting assets already separated into layers in Photoshop that I could simply import into After Effects and animate.
7. Painting the rest of my assets: What was left of my assets to paint after the style frame were the character and the creature which did not take long as I had already made thorough designs (see Lookbook)
8. Animatic: I did about 4 animatic passes only with minor changes to get the timing right
9. Rigging & Animating: There was a minimal amount of rigging and animation involved in this project. Essentially to rig the fish I applied a shadow mask to give the illusion of the tail moving and rigged the rest of the fish with puppet pins and Joysticks n Sliders in After Effects. For the character, I only did very minimal rigging, using a few puppet pins to move her body very slightly and then applying and adjusting a wave filter over each of her hair tentacles and the fish that are swimming from the dunkleosteus.
9. Final cinematic trailer
10. Look book: I found the look book to be more difficult than I thought, I wanted to be able to present my project professionally as practice for designing a physical portfolio. It was fun, but quite difficult to get the right balance of colour, spacing and shapes on each page.
Please see Lookbook for all of the art involved in this project !
Production Roles
Concept Artist
If this were to actually become a large-scale production taking on any of the roles would be tough. Personally I think I would find churning out an insane amount of concept art as would to be the most challenging for me - as much as I love doing it. I think that it would be very easy to burn out drawing pieces upon pieces of iterations of the same character or environment with different colour schemes and slight variations in design concept artist veteran Karl Simon notes that he gets "..frustrated when [he does] too much of the same thing, no matter what it is" (Mon, 2017) . I believe you need to have a strong, deep passion and commitment to being a concept artist. It is also noted that you
"...have to be a good communicator when you work as a concept artist. After all, you are hired to paint other people's ideas..." (Mon, 2017) .
Being a concept artist you would have to communicate and collaborate with just about everyone on the crew from the director to script writers to modellers and lighting team as your work is influencing and embodying the whole of the production before it is put into action. No matter the role, communication is always important.
Post-mortem & Appraisal
There were only a few hiccups in this project. One of which that set me back a fair bit was taking ages to paint my character art in full detail rather than actually focusing on getting the animation done. This painting took almost a week out of my schedule and I fell behind quickly, shooting myself in the foot putting myself under pressure to get something done. I
managed to get something out but that didn't come without more hiccups, I neglected a few small details in the character in the final scene so I could have something in for the pre-screening. I think for next time I need to stick closer to my plan and know when a painting is finished as I was painting details that nobody would see.
Issues aside I was rather pleased with how this project turned out as it was an experimental moment for me animating painted assets. I enjoyed the process thoroughly and felt totally in my element but I don't know if I could withstand the pressure of actually taking on the role of a concept artist in a large-scale production which although sounds contradictory, I have thought lots about.
Cheers,
Grassland
References
Fredin, N. (2017). What it's like to be a Concept Artist: An Interview with Jake Collinge. Retrieved 15 August 2019, from https://www.cgspectrum.edu.au/blog/what-it-is-like-to-be-a-professional-concept-artist/
Mon, S. (2017). Becoming a Concept Artist for a Hollywood Film - ArtStation Magazine. Retrieved 15 August 2019, from https://magazine.artstation.com/2017/07/concept-artist-hollywood-film/
Yu, D. (2018). How to become a better concept artist. Retrieved 15 August 2019, from https://www.creativebloq.com/digital-art/how-become-better-concept-artist-71621082
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