Week 8: Research and Development 2

First and foremost: Prancer has been greenlit! I'm looking forward to spending the next year developing and completing this film along with the people who I'll soon be working with!

Our reading this week deals with dialogue, but since this film won't have any I took note of what it said about sound and music. Sound is something I'm preparing to research more over the Summer so that I can be direct and clear when we begin looking for and working with a sound designer. In my experience so far I have not seen an easy collaboration between sound designers and members of a large animation crew, so I want to change that! By being purposeful in my research and thinking ahead with respect to sound and music I hope to create a collaborative environment that welcomes the input of sound designers from the beginning of pre-production to the final composite. Proper planning is essential to elevating production value!

The final objective of the quarter is creating a video component of some kind, and for mine I want to create at least one mood piece which showcases my ideas for the visual style of the film. I will most likely be painting background and character elements and then compositing them in After Effects. The end result will be a sample shot of the film showing dynamic lighting, moving camera (if only slightly), and atmospheric elements.

I've already begun compiling references for the visual style I'm thinking of, with Kevin Dart being the main starting point. You can see his influence in these Steven Universe layouts which suit the color direction I'm thinking of for the film:

His influence is also clear in the work of Chromosphere, a studio which exemplifies the strong lighting I imagine: https://vimeo.com/chromosphere

I'm also inspired by this quote from Eyvind Earle describing his inspiration for the visual style of Sleeping Beauty's backgrounds:

"I wanted stylized, simplified gothic. Straight[,] tall[,] perpendicular lines like Gothic cathedrals...I used one-point perspective. I rearranged the bushes and trees in geometrical patterns. I made a medieval tapestry out of the surface whenever possible. All my foregrounds were tapestry designs of decorative weeds and flowers and grasses. And since it is obvious that the Gothic style and detail evolved from the Arabic influence acquired during the Crusades, I found it perfectly permissible to use all the wonderful patterns and details found in Persian miniatures. And since Persian miniatures had a lot in common with Chinese and Japanese art, I felt it was OK for me to inject quite a bit of Japanese art, especially in the close-up of the leaves and overhanging branches."

From this I take the note of looking to architecture and art history for inspiration. My next question is to ask how I can make a forest feel like a palace, or at least as rich and beautiful and awe-inspiring as you might imagine a palace to be. Even if the visual style is not as abstracted as that of Kevin Dart or Eyvind Earle, I still see value in drawing lighting and composition influence from their thorough-mindedness.