CINEMATIC :: 25/03/16 - progress and updates

The week after submissions was a pretty hectic one, as we spent all Monday filming our footage.  I was in charge of mostly holding sheets and mirrors while Oscar and Hamish took on the biggest roles amongst our team of acting and filming.  The rest of the week was covered by tutorials, but I did manage to make some depth plate/compositions based on guidelines Hamish gave me

These were done mainly to observe how compositions form in nature, and how we could apply it to the very naturalistic spiritual world.  Things that I have noticed are that compositions where the focal point is in the center tend to be quite small and generally have harmonious circular shapes to strengthen them (second row first image on the left is one I'm particularly fond of).

Over Thursday, I sketched up a few background concepts with Tea and Jo giving me feedback as to what they would like to see.  Much as I love environment design, composition isn't my strong point, so it really helped to have others look at it and tell me what things they thought I should add and where.  We found an absolutely gorgeous landscape image on tumblr that has become a central source of inspiration for our backgrounds, due to the symmetry and colors captured in it:

With this in mind, I managed to come up with a set of rough sketches for the Spiritual world and slapped on a few experimental colors

At this point I'm still not too happy with how the colors in the spiritual world look, but I'm assuming I can tweak those later.  We had a discussion on Thursday about the central focus of the composition as well, and an idea came to light about replacing the central tree with a huge monolith that would help to convey the idea that the ipod in our video would be cutting out.  Tea has sketched up a beautiful concept for how it would work and how it would bring about the transition from light to dark worlds, and her 'monolith' looks a lot better than the sketchy ones I've drawn here.  I might have to resort to pillaging her ideas again.

What I would really like to do over the next few days is livestream a session for my team where I work on the background and they can give me feedback for it in real time.  As I'm having issues with my internet, this probably won't happen, but it would be something I'd like to do at this stage.

I'm going to aim to have a background with proper perspective drawn up by Monday Night.  So stay tuned for updates.