Illustration: Characters

This week long project focused on the creation of characters, although, as typically with Illustration, in perhaps unconventional ways. My favourite way was drawing 3 random shapes in ink, then passing this to someone else and receiving someone else's 3 shapes. We had to select one of the shapes and using the shape as the main form, draw a character. This was passed to someone else again and repeated twice until afterwards we had to give the characters in front of us personality traits. Finally we exchanged sheets again to end up with already formed characters that we had to draw until we knew their design completely, imagining them in different scenarios as well. I loved this way of working as it was incredibly loose and reduced any pressure to immediately come up with an amazing design. When we were given 3 personality traits on Friday and asked to design a character matching them, I found this new way of working great for generating ideas and being a bit different with the designs.

Below are some of my sketchbook pages and character designs from the week.

I love the design of this character - there's so much personality in him just in this one position already (I'm quite annoyed that I didn't design him!)

Given the chance to modify him though I gave him hands to allow better action and lowered his tie below his collar

Nothing harder than trying to make a beaky nose look good in a front view! I took inspiration from Belleville Rendez-vous to help solve it though.

 The Final Colour Test

I wanted his outfit to be as dull as possible so that he could blend into the background, with almost sickly yellow-white skin to show that he often does.

Own Character Design

Personality Traits : Baking, Curvy, Dashing

Luckily it was 'Cake Friday' at college, so there was lots of observational material around. I loved looking at the folds and creases in the cupcake wrappers, which reminded me of old Elizabethan ruffles and the smooth curves of the icing were great to draw.

Initially I was happy with this as my final character design, but I started to find him too static and boring - there was nothing distinctive or unique about him, he looked like a design from Paperchase and he didn't leave any room for actions.

I returned to the ink shapes and this design as the more I looked at him the more his position suggested 'dashing' and his body looked gloppy, like cake mixture.

I really liked the ruffle idea though, so they stayed.

His sticky nature was really fun to play with, particularly on his run.

  
Colour Tests

Just a bit too dark, doesn't suggest cake mixture enough or light heartedness

 Final Choice

Just right! Light beige looks more like traditional cake batter

Overall I found it a great project and a fun week that resulted in some really nice designs and taught me a more natural and inventive way of designing characters that I'll definitely continue to use.

An Evening With Deborah Landis

The other week I got the chance to go to a talk by Deborah Landis at Sheffield Hallam Uni in which she spoke about her recent V&A Hollywood Costume exhibition, but primarily the role of a costume designer for films. While I'd loved the exhibition at the V&A I was worried about feeling a bit out of place at the talk, as I know next to nothing about costume design, but she's one of the best speakers that I've ever been able to listen to. Her enthusiasm for film is incredible and she has a great sense of humour.  I loved the talk as she spent most of it explaining the importance of getting the audience to be a stakeholder in the film and how the best costumes are often the ones that you don't notice as you're immersed in their world so much, rather than talking about the practicalities of design. Costume design is about creating unique individuals each time, but it's also part of making the story come to life. It was a wonderful to hear how she seems to place prominence on helping to create a totally engaging film.

Often during the talk I was surprised though, in particular that the costume designer has to consider the set as well as the costumes so that the two don't clash and that the exhibition took 5 years to curate. Which was understandable as Landis went on to explain that in the Golden Age of cinema the costumes weren't labelled and were handed down to actors, from the leading man in one film, to a supporting actor in another, to then maybe an extra etc, making them hard to locate. In total 130 costumes from 63 lenders were in the exhibition.

The talk was faultless and I enjoyed every minute, that is until the film alarm went off and we all had to exit the building which cut the talk short. However, this meant that I got to meet Deborah Landis outside of the hall and get a photo! (She was lovely and stood outside in the cold signing autographs and having photos with everyone.)

Also, as I found out with Lucy only half way through the talk, Deborah Landis' husband, John Landis the film director, was sat in the audience - in the row behind us! He stood kindly outside in the cold as well and signed an autograph for me!

The talk emphasised to me how important costume design is to a film maker and how unimportant it should be to the audience watching the film. Immersing the audience by creating individuals and worlds on screen is what is key to making incredible films. It helped me to see how costumes should work in films successfully.

Altogether, this was a pretty great day for me.

V&A: Hollywood Costume Exhibition

This was the greatest exhibition that I have ever been to.

Being a film fan I went with the expectation that I would enjoy it, but that it might appeal to lovers of costume design more. I have never been more wrong. 

 

Image from http://www.vandashop.com/Hollywood-Costume-Exhibition-Poster-EVAEX/dp/B009UXALVQ 

The exhibition itself was split into 3 sections: the first dealt more with the script and the transition from this to a costume, looking at areas that have to be considered, like what time period the character is in and their personality and job. Featured here were costumes from Fight Club, The Dude's dressing gown from The Big Lebowski, Charlie Chaplin's Tramp costume (which is tiny!) and Indiana Jones' legendary costume. What was great here was seeing a sketch by Steven Spielberg depicting how he thought Indys' costume should look right next to the actual piece. Plus there were often screens in front of the costumes which showed sections of the relevant script, highlighting sections like when a character trait, motion or costume description were mentioned. I love seeing modern elements in exhibitions - it shows that they're really trying to push the exhibition experience and utilise every possible opportunity. 

The second section was my favourite. It was in two parts, the first looked at the long term collaborations between directors, like Hitchcock, Scorsese and Tim Burton and their costume designers. This involved the use of videos and projections of scripts or notes onto a large table that you could sit around while the directors and costume designers talked. It was an amazing way to hear their opinions straight from them.

The second part dealt with genres really, moving from sci-fi costumes like Darth Vader's (which looks incredibly cheap and almost plastic-y up close) to classic black and white era costumes. I think I learnt the most in this part as I didn't even consider that before colour designers had to think more about pattern, but that too much pattern can be too distracting for the audience. The best area though was the surprising inclusion of an animation section which looked at how motion capture can be used to create 'costumes' like in Avatar or how costumes are actually made for the animators to study (the example there was a costume and model from John Carter), so that they can see how the material might behave. I'd never considered this but it made complete sense, after all the best way to get a sense of something is to observe it. It completely changed my way of thinking about costumes in relation to animation.

The third section was more of a selection of truly iconic costumes, like the Spiderman and Batman suits, Dorothy's dress from The Wizard of Oz and Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter Hogwarts costume (so small!). This section really was like a quick trip through cinema history, especially as it was incredibly busy and the V&A was shutting imminently.

The stand out aspect for me though was the ingenious use of layers of coloured paper making up the (often equally iconic) hair styles instead of leaving the mannequins bald or using wigs. I'm not sure if it's been done before, but they were art works themselves. They were so interesting to look at, but they didn't distract from the costumes, rather they helped to complete them and make them feel like they were being worn, not hung.

The down side? Tickets were so limited that we could only get late afternoon tickets and so we only got 1 hour at the exhibition, which wasn't nearly enough time to read all about the costumes, particularly as it was so busy as well. Plus you couldn't take photos, which was a shame.

In the end I left with a totally different view on costume design. It made me realise the amount of work that goes into them, but also the application of them and their importance to the film. If given the chance, I'd probably be content with living in that exhibition surrounded by those costumes. You could feel the work and love that went into it at every stage, so that you left infected with this same sense of joy and enthusiasm. Simply magical.

Hollywood Costume is on at the V&A until the 27th January.

The Hobbit: 48 FPS

I saw The Hobbit yesterday and while I loved the film I'm still not sure how I felt about Peter Jackson's use of 48 Frames Per Second instead of the traditional 24.


 

 Image from http://www.empireonline.com/gallery/image.asp?id=64237&caption=
 
I saw it on an Imax screen, so the quality of the image and sound (which was amazing, particularly in the Gollum scenes as the sound echoes around you) is probably the highest that it could be, so I had a good position to see how the frame rate affected the film. To be honest I really didn't like it to begin with - I know that the aim of films is to try to immerse you fully in the experience, to make it feel like you're there, but it looked too real, like it was being filmed by a cheaper TV standard camera. It was that detailed that it made some things look fake and sometimes a bit cheap, perhaps especially because it is a fantasy film. Other times it was very immersive and the images were crystal clear, but most times it seemed to drag me away from the world rather than pull me into it. 

The motion capture technology is only improving though - Gollum is so fully formed that you can see Andy Serkis' features coming through slightly, showing the level of detail that the technology picks up now. However, watching The Hobbit made me miss traditional effects as it is incredibly reliant on computer animation. I know it's a fantasy film and most of the film couldn't be made without it, but seeing CGI used to animate a kite, rather than making a real one, made me feel a bit sad inside. Here's hoping that Smaug is made of plasticine in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug next year.

Room on the Broom

Compared to the hype that the animated adaptations of Julia Donaldson's books The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child got, this year's film Room on the Broom seemed lacking in publicity and it was only a week before Christmas when I heard about it.



Image from http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0102qfj/Room_on_the_Broom/

Because of this it surprised me with how good it is - it's incredibly funny, not least because of the Gromit like actions of the Cat, who feels increasingly frustrated by the Witch and resorts to blunt, silent representations of this that seem aimed more at adults than children. The whole film is littered with small, often quick visual jokes and it's charm here is only equaled by the style of animation used. It's computer animation but because of the almost cell-shaded look it has a heavier, denser feeling that reminded me more of stop motion animation than computer. Consequently it almost captured the same quirkiness of stop motion (not quite though, nothing can match that specific level of charm). 

In 25 minutes it manages to establish a group of characters and their individual personalities extremely well and usually without the need for dialogue, which I loved as it pushed focus, emotion and strength onto the images. It's immensely enjoyable, though the only thing that I felt a little disappointed at was the use of a similar threat (of being eaten by a monster) like in Donaldson's other books. Despite that I think it's definitely the best out of the Christmas time adaptations so far.

Room on the Broom can be found on the BBC iplayer.

Empire Magazine: Noma Bar Illustrations

Being a regular reader of Empire magazine I'd seen these illustrations every month in front of the home Review section, but now that there's a feature on them on the Empire website, it just gave me an excuse to talk about them.

Admittedly, I didn't know that they were all by Noma Bar as they just sort of appeared in Empire one month - I thought the art department at Empire had created them because of all the plot references in the images. All of them are charming though and the use of negative space is inspiring (if frustratingly brilliant).

Selection of the illustrations:

The Avengers: Loki what Bar did with the Avengers!

Citizen Kane: As lovely as Rosebud

My favourite? It has to be Jaws, with the Blu-ray logo for an eye and a droopy, loveable smile that reveals itself to be a face - beautiful and amazingly clever!

The full selection can be found on Empire's website.

ABC Printmaking (2)

This session focused on using the practices that we'd learnt last week, like using packaging to print, using stencils to block out colours, layering colours and mono-printing, except we had to combine them with drawings of people that we'd done in our sketchbooks to create figure based prints.

The extra print is simpler and bolder than the intended final image.

Really bold simple shapes seem to work best with the flat colour of printing. It's getting the composition right every time that I seem to struggle with - I want to plan them out more, but it's often accidental pieces that are the best. Still I was able to use more varied layers this time to see the effects that they'd have. In particular I liked the lined background effect - it's perhaps too much on the image above, but it might be good to use in the future.

This week I was more experimental with the pieces and I think the final prints look better because of this. Also having a focus in the faces helps to center the prints more than the previous abstract ones, but overall I liked just having strong expressions in the prints, it makes them more lively and easier to connect to.