Leonie’s small blog island says hullo! (: I hope you didn’t come to this post expecting inappropriate things based on my blog title. It’s been a really busy week even when there’s relatively not as much drawing to see here.
Let’s go crazy! Journal Time!
22nd Wed
train adventuuures (I didn’t draw enough to even fill half a page so see it in the next day)
CwR matte painting feedback from Victor, Will and Heath, did have to make a minor change
CwR colours for the title screen altered to suit the film:
Victor gave me a nudge to change the title font colours. Shall have to animate with these new colours from scratch again though! I’ve also made the white outlines more consistent. Mountains might need fading out more and the shape might need tweaking.
Searching for short film ideas today (it has never gotten easier) and I still was developing it over the next morning (and bothered my brother to bounce ideas off him)
23rd Thurs
train adventuuures
Trains. Where people do stuff.
At times, there’s the issue of too many people that you can’t draw one person properly without someone/thing in the way or there isn’t enough people to draw. Why.
alongside some film storytelling lectures we all had to pitch our stories to the whole class, develop them further into treatments and sort out our groups and roles. I’m with Victor, Will, Tony and Tonko all of which I have worked really well with before.
This major film project is going to go on till September and to my disbelief, my pitch ended up being chosen after much deliberation out of the total of 5 pitches from my group. I wasn’t expecting I would get my pitch chosen twice in a row for two projects (the first one was Cooking with Rex), especially when it involves tricky things like tentacles (as a side-note a classmate brought this up: nothing sexual is involved or intended, as a disclaimer!) and I was struggling for ideas late during the night before, while other team members already had ideas for their stories way before I did.
Originally I was hoping mine doesn’t get chosen so that someone else gets their idea developed this time and the fact that it involves many tentacles and technical unknowns to handle. On the other hand, another part of me just wanted to give it my best shot at making a coherent story. Had initially imagined it to be an actual cartoony/semi-realistic action/horror but since that’s not really an art style I’ve done before so we’re going for a creepy stylised style instead.
Thumbnail for the Creature just to show how it fits within the building so the design is far from final. It is oddly cute though. “The Lady and the Reaper” is a short we’re looking into for art style.
For now it is dubbed as the (Job) Interview Project for now and in terms of the pitch, I need to give thanks to the feedback I got from Heath, Tony, Victor and my brother who each gave me tidbits of suggestions for me to build further the story. (: I developed the treatment more for tomorrow.
24th Fri
train adventuuures (see Sunday’s post…didn’t draw enough again *shifty eyes*)
The Interview Project now called “Position: Vacant” (PV) from now on, name coined aptly by Victor. As a group we now have developed the story further with Tonko as the screenplay writer, with ongoing drafts and revisions based on Heath’s feedback. Got feedback from Tim as well and he brought up good points too in regards to typewriters and eras. On the side, we kept noodling out an art style and figuring out how The Creature will work with the environment.
PV environment/The Creature thumbnail: I’ll…let you piece this together yourself. Just starting to experiment in order to figure out what the scene is like. There was a lot discussion and concerns on how organic this room is and ultimately I was to decide and figure it out for my team. The nonverbal pressure when everyone on my team looked at me was something I wasn’t used to! I guess “Challenge Accepted”…?
25th Sat
PV project: gave feedback and discussed about Tonko’s latest draft of the screenplay and spent the day collecting references and collating moodboards. Realising that there still were so many things to research even when I’ve purposely limited the scope!
Floor Plan version 1
Floor Plan v2
26th Sun
train adventuuures
Hm back of people’s heads dominate during this page I’m afraid.
sketch group meet at the Melbourne Museum; I should go there more in the future! Too much things to draw…and dinosaurs and a corpse of a Giant Squid! Though for the most part, I was exploring alone, I met a few more people (:
Dinosauuurs. Brings back weird memories of Dinosaur kiddy songs. I should have gone to the museum earlier to draw these guys for Cooking with Rex.
More creatures! The Australian lungfish was the only alive subject here on this page. It was curious about me just as I was curious about it. At one point, two of them together stared at me lazily and then moved again just when I was starting to draw the details!
Went to the marine section and found myself writing down latin names instead (PV research!) as I’d rather draw photos of living subjects rather than dead ones for the purposes of my research. But I did take photos of some exhibits. Odd thing that happened: right after complimenting Josh’s drawings, I got complimented by a 5 y/o or so kid for something even when he didn’t even see any of my drawings; he walked past me yet wasn’t looking at my general direction…? Thanks…?
PV project: collecting more references, moodboards and sorting Giant Squid photos
Floor Plan v1b: team members were going for this one so I made the secretary teleport (:
27th Mon
PV collecting references continued and forming moodboards…this project forces me to look at squishy and creepy deep oceanic wildlife. Though since I had a purpose, I didn’t mind so much as I thought. Visually learning heaps about a particular era we’ve chosen too thanks to Victor’s suggestion…around the 60’s. Gave feedback on the current version of the screenplay but I will probably need to follow up in person.
Thanks to Matej‘s feedback, I made the background lighter for the Technical Difficulties screen
CwR Technical Difficulties screen v2: Hope it pops out more Matej!
28th Tues
PV forming the rest of the moodboards of most of the possible props, interior design elements, characters, art style and so on. It is a major project and based on my experiences of the Cooking with Rex project, everything needs to be designed in order for it to work together as a whole. Before I knew it, it was 1:30am in the morning; I didn’t get around to drawing today.
Reflection for the Week
This week. Essentially, it was about coming up with a story very loosely related to myself, getting it green-lighted all of a sudden, then letting go of it so it becomes a better story. The initial story/concept of mine is loosely relevant to me and means something to me. Now as a team, it means something to us and we hope our developed story also means something for all the creative people out there. (:
Amazing how I’ve spent 3.5 days researching about the 60’s and squishy organic life (never imagined I would be looking at creepy creatures)! It is a reasonable amount of research for a 18-20 week major project however and I had to do a lot at once because the Creature is both a character and the environment so I had to ensure I looked into props and environment elements to make sure they all worked with each other. In a way, I was also making sure that when the modellers start making the assets, they are using the same references I’m using.
So not much in terms of visuals this week but a lot of researching, planning and story developing.
Thanks for looking! (: Until next time, Leonie (UUUinfinity/TripleUinfinity)
