Artist Research - Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali's main influence was the realism of the Pre-Raphaelites and the french 19th century painters. He met Pablo Picasso and the rest of the surrealists in Paris and then joined their group and rapidly became the leading figure of the movement for the next 10 years or so. Here are a few paintings I have found of his which I think would be suitable to use for our film:

These are the paintings I found. Again, I can see these paintings working in our film. Surrealism is the way forward for us! Now I have to choose a few finalists and then talk to the group and decide on a final painting for our film!

Surrealism

This is taken from www.artmovements.co.uk:

A literary and art movement, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention. Surrealism inherited its anti-rationalist sensibility from Dada, but was lighter in spirit than that movement. Like Dada, it was shaped by emerging theories on our perception of reality, the most obvious influence being Freud's model of the subconscious. Founded in Paris in 1924 by André Breton with his Manifesto of Surrealism, the movement's principal aim was 'to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality'.

Some artists from this movement are:

Marcel Duchamp

Max Ernst

Rene Magritte

Joan Miro

Salvador Dali

Man Ray

Pablo Picasso

I've already researched into Pablo Picasso and Rene Magritte and no other artists on this list are very well known apart from Salvador Dali. I bet you know what's going to be the next post...

Artist Research - Rene Magritte

I wasn't even thinking about this artist, but I stumbled across this painting by Rene Magritte which I recognised:

Joseph Henson Character Animation Reel from Joseph Henson on Vimeo.

Rene Magritte was a surrealist who took things to a new level. He is well-known for his witty images which he created because he wanted to challenge observers perceptions of reality and force people to be hypersensitive to their surroundings. Here are a few more images I found of his work:

Joseph Henson Character Animation Reel from Joseph Henson on Vimeo.

Joseph Henson Character Animation Reel from Joseph Henson on Vimeo.

These paintings are pretty much perfect for what we need, simple, interesting and engaging. Whilst looking though his work, I found these, which are of a landscape, and he has shown a canvas in front of it, as if it matches up perfectly, creating some really cool images. These reminded me of our film, because its taking an environment and blending it with another. Pretty cool eh?

Joseph Henson Character Animation Reel from Joseph Henson on Vimeo.

I like surrealism and i think its the answer to finding the right painting for our film so I think that's where I will explore for more artists.

Artist Research - Pablo Picasso

Every one knows Picasso's deformed portraits, but funnily enough he started out in his youth painting in a realistic manner. He changed his style, and is best known for his later fame. Picasso was the creator of cubism, which was a 20th century 'avant-guard' art movement (avant-guard means pushing the boundaries of what is seen to be normal). It was inspired by music and literature. Here are some paintings of his which i have picked out that could be good for our film:

These are really nice, and would work really well with our film. I like the third one down, i think it could work really well as a digital environment. I'm just thinking of the character interaction with this 3D painting environment and I don't know if it will be very practical or easy to use Pablo Picasso's work. I'll have to talk to the group and see what they've come up with too, but I think Pablo Picasso is a definite maybe.

I'm really sorry...

...This blog is looking pretty boring with all its words and artists research at the moment, but there will be awesome models and animation tests coming soon so hold tight! In the mean time, back to artist research...

Artist Research - Claude Monet

Monet! He was my favourite artist when I was younger because his paintings just used to draw me in and I'd always splash paint around to try to replicate them... Anyway, he is best known for his water lilies and the 'Bridge over a pond of water lilies'. He was the founder of French impressionist painting, especially with his perception of nature. Here are some works I thought would be contenders...

Yeah, on second thought, his paintings are a bit too technical and loose for what we are looking for. It would be quite hard to recreate these as 3D digital environments in the time given, so I think Monet is out too!

Artist Research - Vincent Van Gogh

I want to stay with the well-known artists, we everybody can relate to our film in someway at least. The first artist I was looking at was Vincent Van Gogh because of the 3D room we found while researching our film idea. I started to look at his works, excluding the one used in the 3D painting because we don't want to copy someone else's work at all.

Vincent Van Gogh sadly died at the age of 37 due to a gunshot wound, but is regarded to be one of the main contributors to the modern art movement. He produced around 2,000 art works and 900 or so were paintings so we have a lot to sift through!

We all decided to go a research the artists and then see if we all picked one in particular, then we'd discuss the actuall painting. Here are the works I chose by Vincent Van Gogh:

As much as I admire his work, I couldn't find any that would work as a 3D environment. I think its best we don't use him anyway because something similar has already been done with his painting. On to the next artist...

Our Film Idea

After seeing these videos, especially the 3D painting one, we all knew what we wanted to do. We were going to recreate a 2D painting and make it 3D. We thought it would be a good idea if we could have a narrative in our film too, as we have animators in our group, we needed to take full advantage of what we had.

And so it begins...

Brainstorming ideas, different possibilities, scenes, cameras, textures, rigs, story, you name it, we covered it. After a whole day and a half of planning and getting our initial ideas down for this film, we had a synopsis for the story line:

During a late evening of maintaining security within the gallery, an exhausted security guard is thrown into a strange and twisted world. Being sucked into a painting where the image becomes his environment, which can't be good news. Fortunately for him, his surreal kidnapping is simply the result of a mix between his over active imagination and his fatigue. Our self inflictive victim returns to reality with the calls of a colleague, leaving him embarrassed and confused, checking his drink hasn't had anything to do with it, and that it did not really happen, or did it?

 Now for the artist and the painting...

Okay so a new idea...

Whilst speaking to Jared, we mentioned possibly using a museum or art gallery instead of a bedroom, but still have the same idea of things shrinking and a character having to run around saving art work from the walls and pots from plinths etc... But after a brief 30 seconds we decided against this because it would be too hard to achieve in one term, even with our awesome team of a certain meat and 5 vegetables.

Sticking with the art gallery theme, Jared told us about a painting by Vincent Van Gogh titled  'Bedroom In Arles' which had been made into an actual room for people to walk around. Here is the original painting:

 

As you can see, its a bedroom. We wanted to role with the art gallery theme still, but here is a video of the real life bedroom (If the video doesn't work click HERE):

Whilst researching this, we came across this video. It's a 3D version of the painting which a camera travels around, showing all the objects in the painting in 3D. We thought this was a super cool idea and this was the starting point for our new idea! Here's that video, and again if it doesn't play, here's a LINK. P.s Sorry about the poor video quality!

Another place where our idea has come from is Mario 64. When you jump into the paintings for each level. We want it to ripple like this one.

Mary Poppins did it too! Although the effects weren't anywhere as good as they can be today. But this is still the idea we are looking at.

In the film 'The Matrix' there is a scene where he touches a mirror and it sticks to his hand as he pulls it away from the mirror. It looks pretty cool so we will use this as reference for our film too. I couldn't get the video on my blog but if you click this link, it takes you to the video on YouTube. Click here for The Matrix mirror scene.

Ideas Ideas Ideas...

Our initial idea was to create an environment which changes, as animation is all about change, from one frame to the next. We liked this idea as it fitted quite well into the 'changes in use of the environment' area of the brief. As there are 2 animators in our group we wanted to have a sort of narrative in our film, rather than just having the only animation as a moving camera around a beautifully modeled, textured environment.

So our frist idea was to have a character be sitting at a desh in a bedroom and having objects in the room pop and get smaller and have the walls creep up on him when he wasnt looking. We liked this idea because it was like the environment changing around the charcter and we could play with his emotions and reactions as we wanted to get as much character animation in this porject as possible.

We spoke to Jared about this idea and long story short, we were told it sucks. We realised that the bedroom was obvious and the whole scaling objects was both cheap and easy animation which we weren't prepared to lose mark on. As well as this, there is almost no research we could have done for this environment because a bedroom is just a bedroom. So now its back to the drawing board and spider diagrams of ideas!

Groups!

We now have a full group with a variety of specialties. Our group name is: Meat and 5 Veg. James being the meat and us 5 being the veg. We have all of the main specialties covered and what we don't know how to do, we will learn and work together to get the best possible results. Our group and specialties consist of:

Myself (Joe Henson) - Animation
Nick Georgeou - Animation
James Tomkins - Producer/Modeling/Rendering/Editing
Maik Pham Quang - Modeling
David Fish - Modeling
Malakai Richking - Concept/Sound

I'm really happy with who is in our group and the level of work they we are all capable to produce. Let the ideas start flowing!

Environment!

So after our fist lecture for our digital environment project, we had to start brain storming ideas for this project. We also had to get into groups of 4-6 people who we will be working with towards a finished short film for this term. We also have to choose a profession this year which we want to go into in animation. This could be many areas, such as modeling, animating, texturing etc so we have to choose our groups around this, as having a group of 6 concept artists wouldn't be practical and wouldn't make things very easy. I personally am going to focus on animating as I enjoy this the most.