Wednesday 27 January 2010

Pre or Post ... Pre!

Alright. So we're into week three and the big projects begin and this term we're given two options to chose from that we will be assessed on: either opting for pre-production or post-poduction.

The brief for Post-Production is to produce a 30 – 60 second piece that combines live action footage with hand drawn or digital element; working in small groups of 2+ capturing our own live footage, which is to be roughly storyboarded. For example this work could include aspects such as set-extension, green/blue screen footage, sky/object replacement and rig removal. So looking at the breakdown of movie scenes and advertisements for the visual effects would give a good idea of the stuff we'd be doing. The brief for the pre-production project incorporates elements of research, character and setting design and storyboarding. Working with five scripts from the revived Dr. Who, rather than dealing with the aliens and spaceships in the series, we will concentrate on the time travel aspect to allow opportunities for research into real places and costume design. By the end of this project we will end up with a pre-production bible for an animated Dr. Who episode for one of the scripts.

I have chosen to opt for pre-production, which is something I'm really interested in doing as a possible job. There is so much freedom in the design process, and how we interpret the scripts will be different and as unique as the last, since no two people have the same experiences, or even the same way they imagine how things appear to be. So this is a great opportunity to put my own take on how objects, costumes or scenes appear and should look from my imagination.

So far for this project I've created all of my design boards (A3 in photoshop) for the various areas I should be covering, which is: Pompeii's costumes; the ocean liner's architecture and props; Louis XV era architecture and costume; the Chino-planet props and; 1599 London's landscape. The hardest areas to research were the costumes for Pompeii and 1910-1920 ocean liner interiors (namely finding images for Titanic) this is due to the fact that these places have been destroyed and in ruins.

Clothes from ancient Pompeii will have decayed over the time in volcanic ash so there will be no hard evidence of their clothes. But as Pompeii is in Italy there is a fair chance that these clothes will be like those that were in Rome at that time; so as well as looking at surviving wall paintings in Pompeii for an idea of clothes, I looked into Roman togas and clothes as well. There is also not much surviving evidence for how the interiors of ocean liners looked, especially as it seems as though the script bases the setting on the Titanic so I looked at old photographs that have survived of the Titanic and other ships. In addition to this I looked into home interiors during 1900-1920 to get a good feel for how the architecture could be inside an ocean liner, but on a much bigger scale and of more grandeur (as most of the passengers on board would be the rich, and those who could just afford to travel across the seas). And this is how I overcame these problems.

Chino-Planet Props

As well as initial research I've also started a little bit of sketchbook on work for props, drawing my own designs and how I see these items after the research and reading the script.

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