Moodboard

After compiling all my research, visual links & references, I decided to make a moodboard, which will hopefully inspire the over all look of the project. I've made sure to incorporate lots of grey, rain, and urban environments, with the occasional make-believe character for good measure!

Even More Visual References

Some interesting examples of 2D drawing over photography and real backgrounds....

Ernest Zacharevic

M/M Paris

Tim Winn

More Visual References...

 Adam showed us a music video - 'Float' by Flogging Molly - which proved to be a great visual reference! It centres on a lonely, weird creature exploring and interacting with his surroundings, much like our lonely, weird creature! The video itself is executed brilliantly so it's worth watching even past the urban section, which was a great source of inspiration to us.

I was searching online for related content to 'Slinkachu' (see post below!) and I came across some fantastic work by Isaac Cordal. He's been doing a project called 'Cement Eclipses' since 2006 whereby he makes tiny human figurines out of cement (which stand at only about 25cm tall) and places them in interesting, urban environments.

Cordal's work then lead me on to even more tiny model art, this time from Christopher Boffoli. He's been working on his project since 2003, incorporating mini-figurines with food - he calls it 'Big Appetites'! His work seems a lot more delicate than either Slinkachu's or Isaac Cordal's, and has a more fine-art quality to it. Despite the fact that it's photography and not filmography, I would definitely like to use similar tones and hues; but perhaps make them even more desaturated.

Visual References

Since Adam's pitch I took some time finding some visual references which we could take elements from as a source of inspiration, which would also help develop our ideas. Before even looking online, I instantly thought of two separate artists whose work was very similar to our ideas.

During A-Levels I studied and made some visual responses to the work of a Swedish artist called 'Johan Thörnqvist'. He takes stunning photographs of (mostly) urban environments and then draws on top of them creating alternate universes, combining fiction and reality in a really beautiful way.

 

'Slinkachu' is another artist I discovered a couple of years ago, who much like Thörnqvist, creates different worlds through the use of mixed media. However, instead of illustration he uses tiny model human beings taken from train sets, which don't reach more than 1cm tall. Because of their minute size, the photography is largely close-up which provides a huge amount of detail - an element we could easily add to our project.

Groups

During one of our Time Based Narrative seminars, some of us were pitching ideas and pieces of music - I was most interested by Adam's choice of song and narrative. He chose 'Emily's Theme 2' which was particularly melancholy yet had some nice variation and what seems to be different sections within the song (perfect for a group project)!

His idea for a storyline was two characters who meet and fall in love, but are somehow separated in the end; essentially, a tragic love story. What I liked most about Adam's pitch was his stylistic choice - he wanted to have a live-action background, with animation over the top. Also, he was siding towards an urban environment which I thought would be both appropriate and interesting to work with. Fran was also interested in Adam's pitch, so we decided to be a group of three - which works perfectly as the piece of music has three sections.

Adam also showed us some great visual references which also included the mixed-media style of film and animation.

http://vimeo.com/34082328 < I especially enjoy the mood of this piece, and I think that the camera shake definitely adds to the animation, making the creatures really come alive. The doodle-style of the creatures is spot on for the kind of characters I want to create.

http://vimeo.com/30302943 < Another good example with a great colour scheme, but the creatures are just a little too polished for the style we're going for.