So, this is the introduction to the 15 grueling weeks in
which I will be working on the Final Major Project for my degree at De Montfort
University. It’s going to be tough but, fingers crossed, it all will come
together in the end. Sorry for this boring introductory blog post, I’ll try and
keep it interesting.
My plan is to keep this blog up to date, documenting the processes
that I’ll go through in creating final piece, as well as some reflections and
analysis on my own work, and the works that are inspiring me.
I suppose I’d better explain what the project is then?
I aim to create a small environment and character inspired
by various noir and neo-noir films and characteristics, with some kind of
narrative if possible; most likely this will be a murder scene. This reflects the aims I have for my job
prospects when I leave University and go into the big wide world; I’d like to
show I’m a capable character artist as well as an environment artist.
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| Heat (1995) Michael Mann |
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| Angel-A (2005) - Luc Besson |
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| The Third Man (1949) - Carol Reed |
I have a number of goals I would like to achieve by the end of
this project:
- Display good organisational skills – hence the blog that I should be posting in bi weekly and the intense timetable I’ve written for myself.
- Show good visual analysis – again, the blog is a big part of this. I plan on posting movie stills, (such as the background of this blog currently, from the 1955 film The Big Combo), screenshots of games, and other noir-inspired images, then breaking them down and then applying what I’ve learnt from them to my own work. Continually iterating my own ideas as well, should show this.
- Show that I can produce a character with anatomical accuracy – this should clearly demonstrate my skill as a character artist.
- Obviously, producing a piece of polished work for my portfolio (and also developing my portfolio further) – this pretty much goes without saying, but I would like to have a good quality, finished piece of work for my portfolio. I’ll do this by making sure that my environment is fairly small so I can focus on polish, rather than over extending myself as I have done in SO many of my projects.
Well, now that’s all explained, I’ll
talk about my aims for the week.
Week 1 Plan - 12th January to 18th January
Schedule creation- Research (photos/style guide)
- Level Block out/lay out plan
- Base Character anatomy mesh
- Thumbnails of environment
- Simple style guide
Introductory Blog post- Blog post review at the end of the week
The research I’ve started so I’ll do a separate blog post talking about some of the themes and such of film noir and neo-noir, both visually and from a narrative perspective. I’ll be watching various films throughout these 15 weeks to get more inspiration, so I’ll maybe do some posts about my thoughts on those as well
My tutors gave me the idea to come up with 7 different environment ideas, seeing as I'm still undecided, and then do some basic white-boxes/thumbnails of them. The ideas I've got so far are:
- back alley (obviously)
- hotel room
- bar
- detective/private investigators office
- docks
- bridge
- cafe
Time to watch some movies, I think. I crave that inspiration.
- Hannah
