Degree Show Trailer

After the fall of the Kelpie, I took on some work for the degree show trailer that a classmate is working on. He needed a background and since I no longer had a film taking up all my time and some concept art to fill up, I thought what the heck. The film has a sort of comic film-noir feel, so I looked into that sort of thing and came up with a few bits and bobs before doing the background.

When it comes to drawing mobsters, is there anything more fun than fedora's under streetlights and tommy guns?

So I started drawing the city pretty straight up-and-downy and it was pretty damn boring. 

Tried to make the buildings squinty, but that still wasn't looking all that great, so I checked out the comic 'Spy vs Spy' that Calum referenced in the script, and was inspired to do a faded skyline, and to make the horizon extremely squint.

spy vs spy... in case you didn't guess...

some skyline style tests.

Spot the Godfather reference ;)

The final background, (complete with degree show film references) with a texture overlay, gradient, and colour corrected to more sepia tones, rather than straight up black and white. 

Concept art from the year

These terrifyingly bright ones are inspired by the works of Jolomo and Pam Carter, although I haven't achieved any of their beauty or finesse at handling (digital) paint.

Jolomo

Pam Carter

These were all early ones, working out how this whole textured, swirly-wirliness was going to work.

More Nina concept art

This is the sort of 'final piece' I've been working on. Le sketch of the attic in which Nina dies.

I changed the perspective to make it feel smaller and claustrophobic. 

And added grimy textures to add more atmosphere. 

I thought I was finished with the previous one but I decided to add Death in (in the same style as the film's character design). I tried some brighter colours and thought yellow was a nice angry and violent colour, but it wasn't quite working.

Dulled the yellow down a bit, shrunk him and added flowing lines as if he's materialised from the room itself. 

I decided that Niina needed to change style so I re-drew her in the same style as Death. However, i had some trouble making her looked hanged; she looks like she's just chillin' there. Also added shades of grey to Death, to make him look more corporeal.

Think I finally got the hanged look down. Added the shade to Nina as well, but more extreme as she's directly in the light from the window. 

Bombshell

I had to make a big decision today that I'm both happy and unhappy about; to drop Kelpies for the time being.


We have little over 2 weeks until hand-in and a month tomorrow until degree show, and we're barely over the halfway mark with scenes. Because of assessment (which asks for us to have 2 specialisms, with work on a minimum of 2 films with one of the specialisms, meaning that the films are technically not needed, as I could have worked on my specialisms by themselves instead of working them into a film) most of us in the Kelpie team are starting to panic that we don't have enough specialism work, and would like to concentrate on that to beef it up. That then leaves the 10 days after hand-in until the degree show, and even then it'd be pretty impossible to pull off the amount we still have left to do to a standard we're happy with. We will continue to carry on work with Kelpies after university, but unfortunately we won't have a film to show at the degree show. This saddens me greatly, but it would be far more disheartening to see a film I wasn't happy with being shown, and to have received a poor grade because I wasn't concentrating on my specialisms. This just really shows how important time keeping is, and that it's important to judge that there are certain challenges that are just too big (horses and water spring to mind, anybody?)!


Alas, it's a shame, but it's not the last Kelpies has seen of the world :)

Going back to scene 14

I decided that the hills in the version I thought I had finished were actually too flat, so I came back to it. I took the outline off, as the other scenes didn't have it, and added some shadows in. 

Also a colour key I whipped up for the others to use.

Rejigging backgrounds

This one is just fixing the background before I hand it over to Steph so she can do her painting thang (putting Murdo and the sea and the boat in etc etc, same as I've been doing). Again, overlayed textures, swirly-wirliness, clouds etc.

Colour corrected, as the one above was looking a lot darker than the other scenes. 

DOJ-CON

On top of doing animation and concept art for Dancing Nina, plus that, directing and more for Kelpies, I've been working to help organise DOJ-CON, a popular anime convention/degree show fundraiser. The most artistic input I had in it was designing the posters and flyers for the day (although this isn't all I did; think emailing/meetings etc etc). This was both fun and hair-tearingly frustrating.

The after-party poster/flyer

The flyer

The main poster

I'd like to say that none of the actual artwork was done by myself (we commissioned a couple of artists and they produced this lovely work). I just put the posters together, and fitting all that info in was way harder than it should have been.