Cogs Cogs Cogs

Started modeling the clockwork innards of Twinklebox.

This is the visual reference sheet of cogs and clockwork parts that I’m working from.

Environment Reference Sketches

Some sketches of Antarctic hut reference imagery. Scott’s bunk, box of penguin eggs, etc.

Horstmann Reference Sheet

This is a reference sheet I used to make Horstmann. There are some other lamps on here for a variety of reasons. The chap on the right is George Carwardine, the inventor of the anglepoise lamp. The chap on the left is Charles Terry, son of the founder of Herbert Terry Ltd.

Macklin Street Mood Board

This is one of the mood boards for the design and feel of Horstmann’s environment. It’s made up of images taken from Macklin Street taken a while ago with Jim. I build many mood boards for many purposes but the main use is as a quick reference of what things should look like. Even though I have a very clear understanding of what everything should look like and the overall feel, it is easy when working closely on a shot to get caught up in very specific details and lose sight of the overall. I constantly use reference imagery to compare what I’m working on with what I originally set out to create. Coming from a fine art background I’m very used to looking closely at the real world and analysing how different surfaces react to light in different ways or how objects look but there are always details you don’t pick out until you try to recreate those things from scratch. There really is no better way to learn someones face than drawing it, scrutinising every tiny wrinkle and imperfection before capturing it on paper.

Siege Concept Art

This is a concept image of what all the different elements in the film might look like together. The butterfly/colour tendrils element is a little weak but the overall effect is quite nice. Making these images is a quick way of seeing how a final shot may look and aid lots of decisions that might save time at this stage of the production. I can see from this image that the grimey look to the large flat areas will help fill the awkward spaces visible in the previs renders and detract from the peripheral objects as focal points within a composition. I want to be able to flatten the room as a vignette to the main focal points of the butterfly and the lamp so a constant level of detail throughout the frame will help control the movement of the eye throughout the frame.

This is the starting point for the image above. It’s a still shot from the previs environment. All the objects are simple proxy versions and only have basic colours applied. The lighting is basic yet is close to the way I want the lighting to work within most of the shots. The key lighting will be from Horstmann, it will be the main shadow caster and will vary slightly in colour depending on the mood but generally will be a warmer tungsten to give warmth to his character against the colder blue ambient lighting. I think each scene will be treated slightly different depending on the composition but generally this will be the starting point. I also want to have strange incedental lighting throughout, perhaps as oddly lit areas in places where there will be no logical source, almost as reflected light bouncing from objects out of sight. I’m thinking of building up the scenes with more glass objects to enforce this idea of light moving around the scene in a strange and unsettling way.

The following images are a selection of the main reference images used to build up the concept image above. They are all found off the internet at different times throughout the pre production phase, mostly google search results. The Lamp is from the first time I think I saw a Horstmann and Hadrill lamp, I found it on Ebay and instantly fell in love. I bid on it but soon realised that these lamps don’t sell cheaply.

As well as compositing parts of reference imagery together there is also a good amount of digital painting involved, mainly adding highlights in the correct places and working into the image to make it believable. Because i’m using my old PC at the moment I’ve not created any special brushes, so all the paint and clone work was done using Photoshop’s simple brush presets.

The Siege Begins

We cast our net into the digital ocean and dredge it clean of colour… Searching for the right kind of reference imagery can sometimes be a drawn out affair… To model something accurately you might need multiple viewpoints and a variety of distant and close-ups… I got a few butterfly shots last summer but the amount of butterfly imagery on the internet is unsurprisingly vast.

For any project I think it’s important to begin with, and continue collecting reference imagery. I like to collate the imagery into a sort-of contact sheet and quite often manipulate these as a form of experimentation. This can sometimes throw up some interesting ideas or methods that can carry through into the final project but mostly it’s a good way to immerse yourself in different aspects of the project and get acquainted with the subject matter.

For this image I’ve taken the contact sheet above and basically got a bit filthy in Photoshop for an hour. It’s got multiple versions of the butterfly layers with different filters and blending modes. I’ve worked into it with some floral brushes, added some vector blossoms, overlaid some photos and previously made artwork but most importantly treated each cell with a different colour palette. This is one of a few different colour exercises I’ve been working on.

Colour has always been a huge element in all of my projects, although it’s normally stripped away to almost nothing… A lack of colour is still carefully contemplated. ‘The Fool’ is almost completely desaturated, the amount of colour and the grade continually changed throughout the production until the final moments. Many hours of subtle tinkering led to slightest of reddened shadows and green tinted highlights and on first glance appears completely devoid of colour… I feel it’s very much a subliminal difference that it has on the film overall, it’s not obvious enough to notice but gives it a warmth without detracting from the texture and form of the… well without sounding too much like a wine taster… colour is very important. A Siege of Colour requires more than I’m usually comfortable with… So I’m thinking about it… a lot.