Friday, 19 April 2019

Documentary Week 7 - Starting the backgrounds

I have been having a hard time starting these backgrounds and I've been scrapping and restarting them a lot. My main focus is to finish the backgrounds my team needs first in case I have to drop the project and run for personal reasons, but after a few tries at the village close up background I ended up starting with the simpler river background to get a feel of the style I'm trying to achieve.

The visual for this background is based on a "huge sailing boat" that was mentioned in another part of the interview (that we opted not to use the audio for but just the visual to mix it up). I ended up asking Arin (the daughter of the interviewee) about it and she sent me a picture of what it would've looked like (as they're not common anymore and I'd never seen one in person) so I knew what to look for. My reference pictures consisted of both paintings and actual pictures:




The river background with the boat guide looks like so:


Now that I had a style down I started on the village close up background. These were the references:



And this is how it looks with a rough guide of the villager crowd:


I ended up redrawing the hut about three times and I was not as happy with how it generally turned out so asked my team if they had any suggestions. In the meantime I've uploaded this to the drive for El to use as a guideline for her scene and I'll improve on it later when everyone has their rough backgrounds.

What I learned:
  • How to simulate a watercolour painting in Photoshop by using a mixture of watercolour and smudge brushes
  • The usefulness of using both watercolour and real life references to help with the backgrounds

What worked well:
  • The general washy style of the river background
  • Simplicity of river background
  • The trees, hut and hay of the village close up background
  • The general blending of the colours in both backgrounds

What could be improved:
  • More trees in the village close up to add more interest
  • Possibly extra grass/ground details in the village close up background

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