The 'What If?' Metropolis - Orthographs

The finished orthographs for my city! I really liked doing these, and I feel like they came out really well.

The 'What If?' Metropolis - Production Art

Finally finished my production art and my orthographs ready for tomorrow! Here's the production art, as well as a bit of the processes I used. I already made a post showing my production art of the houses that will be in my scene, and I asked for some feedback on colours. I've decided to go with the turquoise colour scheme, so here's what the final version looks like:

Then I did the art for the street lamps in the city. I started with the sketches I'd made from my thumbnails and then made a coloured version which looked like this:

However I really didn't like these lamps... They just didn't look right! So I did a bit of tweaking. I changed the light area to a teardrop shape instead of an oval and it made such a nice difference. I also made the lamp post a bit darker. Here's my final production art for the lamps!

After this I moved on to the main building that will be in my scene, and it'll probably be the centre of attention because of its size and design. This is the building where all the 'perfect' people live, so it needed to be a bit brighter than the rest of the city. I used dark blues, turquoise and yellow to make it light up a little more. To make sure it was completely symmetrical I drew one side first and then mirrored it to have it look 'perfect' in that way. Just what Ernst Haeckel would have wanted!

Those are the three main assets that will be in my city! I will be having a lot of different versions of the houses by using distortion and sizing tools to make them all similar but a bit different. All of the lamp posts will be the same and line the streets, and the main 'perfect' building will hopefully be the most central feature to my city to show the dystopian/utopian viewpoint. Next post showing my orthographs will be up soon!

The 'What If?' Metropolis - Coloured Production Art

I'm currently finishing off my production art ready for the OGR on Wednesday and I took some time to add different colours to my houses to see which scheme works the best! The first one is the original black and white version that I started with, then I used an overlay layer on top of the original and coloured the drawings in. Which colour would you pick?

Original

 Blue

 Turquoise

 Purple

 Green

Life Drawing

Last week's life drawing! I really enjoyed experimenting with a water brush and pens.

Toolkit - Maya UV Layout

Finished the cube tutorial in Maya. Hooray!

Life Drawing

This weeks life drawing!

Contextual Studies - Genre Part 1

In our last contextual studies lesson, we went over genre. Studying genre means that you can analyse films more effectively. Genre influences how objects are designed, including costumes and environments. It also helps to show the connotations and meanings generated through the design of these elements.

We looked at a lot of remakes during the lesson, where we watched all of the trailers for every Alien film that has been released so far. We were asked to consider how it has evolved politically and globally, and how time changes influence how the genre has grown. For example, sci-fi that was make in the 1950's isn't the same a sci-fi today.

Genres are set patterns that film makers follow, to give the audience something they want with their movies. It also conveys different messages about society depending on how the plot of the story pans out. For example, we watched the trailer for When Worlds Collide (1951), and looked at the happy ending of the film. During the time this film was made the US was in a great depression and was in the Cold War. The message from this film is telling society that it's all going to be ok: it's giving people what they want to see and hear. This pattern is reflected through a lot of movies, both recent and old.

One interesting thing that we noticed when going through all of the Alien trailers was that they are all the same but with different characters each time. This creates certain expectations of what the film will be like and how it'll end, which conditions the response the audience will give. I found this really interesting, because although it's essentially the same film re-recorded over and over again, where the character fights the alien and survives in the end, it's still hugely popular today. Genre can offer solutions and reinforce social values by offering imaginary responses to real problems.