Fred's CG Arts and Animation Blog: January 2012

Tuesday 31 January 2012

Unit 4: Initial Ideas

Here are some peliminary ideas for the story including all three of my given words:

1. an Elderly man (the sculptor) has made a tiny Art gallery inside a matchbox just big enough for insects and travels around showing it off. (not a complete idea and to be honest not a very good one. I didn't feel as if it was working or if there was a story to be told with it but I chucked it in just the same.)

2. a young sculptor filled with ambition and dreams of stardom presents one of his best works to the local Art Gallery in the hope that they will display it in the up and coming Exhibition. the young man then has his dreams smashed as the curators verbally destroy him, his work and his naive ambition to become a famous sculptor. He is then laughed out of the Gallery and into the street where he is swallowed up by the heavy rain as he runs off into the darkness. Later that night he breaks into the Art Gallery and attempts to burn it down using a Box of Matches in order to exact his revenge. But, the oily canvases of all the paintings catch too quickly and he is trapped inside the building.

3. an empty Gallery at night. the are a few lights on for security purposes but it is still fairly gloomy, there are paintings hanging on the walls but the main feature of the exhibit is a magnificent statue which takes pride of place in the centre of the room. tucked just out of sight behind a small white-marble pedestal in the corner of the room lies a small matchbox. a tiny man pushes the box open and looks forlornly at the huge statue in the middle of the room. after a while he gets out of the match box and starts pacing his usual route around the room looking for various assorted bits of nick-nacks and bric-a-brac droppeed by the Gallery partrons during the day. as he approaches the bin on the other side of the room he glances up at the statue. he shighs and keeps walking but he stopps when his foot bumps against a large decorative hairpin that lies on the floor infront of him. he bends down to pick it up but when he does he finds that it is broken leaving one end sharp to a point. he stares at the point for a few seconds and glances up at the statue again. he looks back over his shoulder to his matchbox house. and a huge smile appears on his face. he sprints off down the room and dives into his match box appearing seconds later with a matchstick in one hand and the hairpin in his other. Turning to the marble pedestal he proceeds to hit the head of the match against the back end of the hairpin (effectively using it as a hammer and chisel). when the sun comes up in the morning a security guard enters the room to find a small copy of the main statue in the corner of the room where the pedestal had been.

- Alternative Story: the Statue in the centre of the room has no name next to the Artist and also no head on its shoulders. At the end The security guard finds that the marble pedestal had been carved into the missing head leading the audience to believe that the small matchbox dwelling man is the original sculptor

- Alternative story: the statue in the centre of the room depicts a naked man standing up and at the end the security guard finds out that someone has carved a small decorative fig leaf out of the marble pedestal in order to hide the statues "you-know-what".

Unit 4: Storytelling - Beginnings

The three words that I randomly selected from the provided envelopes to help structre this new unit are as follows.

Environment - Art Gallery

Prop - Box of Matches

Character - Sculptor

I'm quite happy with both the environment and the prop but I think the sculptor fits too well with the Art Gallery compared to the Box of Matches, but I suppose I can make it work.

Thursday 19 January 2012

DVD Template

The Wicker Man Review

The Wicker Man 1973this review is only part way done :(

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

A quick concept painting showing a basic train station. This started out as a thumbnail but then evolved into a concept, becuase I was unaware of this at the time I hadn't been saving it. there isn't alot of difference between figure 1 through 4 but I like figure three the most. I think it gives a nice idea on perspective and space and I think it works rather well as a piece, I just now need to think of something uncanny to do with it.

Initial Thumbnails


Figure 1.

My Initial idea was to do a long empty corridor possibly from a hospital but it just felt a bit too obvious, so I started looking at train stations and decided to go more in that direction.

Figure 2.

Colour Influence Map

This Influence Map, is looking purely at colours, mainly rusty browns and electric greens. I like the idea of giving my final piece an almost dreamlike, psycadellic, slightly oversaturated effect with the colour scheme. The middle Picturre was taken by one of my best friends on his trip to australia and is the focal point of this map.

Influence Map

This Influence Map contains images of trains, stations, coridoors and a painting called Night Hawks by Edward Hopper. the general idea is that all these spaces feel as if they need to be busier. Although some of the pictures have people populating them they feel frustratingly empty to me.