Desert designs

Although I haven't yet started work on it, I'm now on animating a character on the third year project. This accordian player is one of the revellers in the celebration scene so I need to make a loop of her playing the instrument.
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I will make a pdf of this but here's one of the initial pages of the storyboard for the cinematography project.
I think despite the fact the characters are drawn as indistinct blob people I was thinking of a storyboard for an animation rather than a film and drew every action of the characters like the actors wouldn't be able to work it out themselves, meaning it's far too long for the amount of action displayed. I gathered from the storyboard we were shown that more detailed images solely for illustrating the type of shot are more appropriate. My current roles for the project are producer and storyboard artist.
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When I was researching Apollo, apart from him being a sun god/medicine god/plague god/oracle/general arse as is befitting the greek pantheon, there was a study of two schools of thought in psychology called Apollonian and Dionysian, being sun and earth deities respectively (or cthonic for earth, which sounds so fancy I'm going to try to fit it into my usual vocab). The idea goes that Apollo represents logic and structure while Dionysis represents artistic expression and wildness and with the two together the best tragedies come about- a man tries to create order in a world of a uncontrollable nature and ultimately fails.
The idea I had is the reverse of this- the satyr, as a dionysian creature, is only really concerned with drink, girls and having as much fun as possible but is forced to work by Apollo in a sort of parody of fun, that isn't enjoyable at all. Sort of a reverse of the usual tragedy, in which individualism and freedom of expression is crushed by the pursuit of logic and conformity. Gosh I'm deep.
There will be designs of Apollo posted at some point, he's a pain trying to come up with something.

Here's a few of the backgrounds I've been trying out for the Pre-production, messing around using Corel Painter's artist oils effect. The learning curve for this program seems to be brutal, so I'm not going to attempt drawing characters in it. At all.

The purple light was meant to look unnatural, but I actually find it quite pretty. One of the ideas I had was that the desert the theatre is set in was actually quite a beautiful place, but it's the presence of the theatre and Apollo that is starting to make it more rigid and structured, losing it's wildness. This is probably a night scene, although with surrealism it's hard to tell.

I'm unsure how to texture in Corel so good, reliable photoshop is there to help out. I wanted to use lots of tectures in this project for the audience and other characters to give them a weirder look, although I need to find out how to use masking properly.


Sort of a WIP as I want to put the Theatre somewhere in the background sucking the colour out of the scene. I was looking at Salt flats for other floor textures and some looked like hexagons, which made me think of a lizard or serpent. This isnt the back of a creature, just a scaly desert.
As tempting as it is to start chucking in some Aztec imagery that's too close to Yume Nikki than I imagine is allowed.


I've done these, but I'm so stuck on this project. Drawing realistically is really, really hard and trying to stop one of the four topics from drifting out of focus from the rest is problematic, particularly the middle ages. All I've got that references it is The Black Death, srsly. I just spent an hour and a bit putting this together rather than attempt anything else. Right now I feel incredibly stressed but there doesn't seem to be a way around it.

Picture this...

With the preproduction and post production project, I've chosen to do Pre production as I think most of my strengths on the course are in this area of animation.

With the randomised cards, I recieved-

Character-
Satyr

Show-
Live at the Apollo

Style-
Surrealism (Originally Picasso but COME ON! I can't work with that!)

Setting-
Middle Ages

So I've certainly got a lot of things I can research historically. I'm leaving Satyrs for the moment as although I've browsed them online, I'm hoping to get some Mythology books out for something more indepth. However, here is some copy and paste research from a website on them-
"The satyr comes from Greek mythology; they were companions of the Greek god of wine and entertainment, Dionysus. There was no actual female of the species until “satyress” was invented by poets, seeking to make the ever lustful satyr a female companion."

Better it goes after it's own species, apparantly. I haven't found when the term satyress was created yet but it sounds like something much later, so that might fit into the "middle ages" theme for the greek mythological creatures.
"Satyr is the root of the word for satire, which generally means comedy."

Which, if true, woud work very well with the Live at the Apollo theme or at least is worth horrible pun. That and I've been mispronouncing it constantly.

"The satyr was generally depicted as a man with sometimes cloven feet, small or full horns of a goat, large, point ears and a constant erection."

I might not include that last part into the designs. Might.

" In mythology, they are usually associated with comedy, sex drive, mischief, and fertility; they roamed the woods and mountains. Usually, satyrs were quite busy preying on the various forest nymph; minor deities and children of a union between mortal men and women and gods. Satyrs were said to be obsessed with them and are often depicted in different mediums of art as copulating with them, or at least trying to."

Satyrs seem to be work shy, sex obsessed drunks to smmarise them at their most basic, which is the same stereotype as a lot of comedy protagonists. I'm also looking at the story of a Satyr who challenged Apollo to a musical contest and lost sorely which would be a really wonderful thing to use as reference for a story.

What I've been looking at in slightly more depth is the surrealism, although beyond basic artist research I'm not very far with that either. I'll post more on it when the research is done rather than picture links as the upload seems to be broken on blogger right now.

Here, however, are some examples of surrealism in animation I found.


This is a frankly insane series of short animation called Popee the Performer. the stories follow Popee, the guy in the stripey rabbit suit, and his 'friends' Pepee the circus leader(?) and Kedomono the wolf (my personal favourite). The three live in a circus in the middle of the desert and generally don't get on at all. Examples of story lines include anticipating the other persons movement so much they stop moving completely, becoming ghosts to stop someone killing them and creating an imaginary friend to steal somebody elses imaginary friend.

They're extremely random, frequently very funny if you like bizarre humour but 'd say he example I posted above epitomises the kind of surreal atmosphere of the show and the strange setting.


You know, I was checking through my posts to see if I'd already linked to this video, but it doesn't seem like I have. I am surprised!


This is an advertisement for Loius Vitton for a new range by Takashi Murakami, a japanese artist who both parodies and exploits Japans obsession with cute and childish things. This particular advert was directed by the director behind the Digimon film, in case you recognised the style of the little girl.

Anyway the point of posting this is because of the strange way the girl ends up inside another dimension and the general oddness of the environment.