Sunday 30 November 2014

Headless Concept art

The animatic has finally reached a point that im happy with so its now time to move onto concepts :) At this stage in the project I am the only 3rd year pre production concept artist working on this film and with so many modellers working on the project i am immediately under pressure to produce concepts quickly as it has started to get to the stage that the modellers are modelling things such as buildings and vehicles from photo reference and trying themselves to change it to the style im going for but not achieving the look i want. so its been a struggle to keep everyone going in the same art direction but now i have time to create some concepts it is starting to look more like what i had initially imagined. Anyway here are the concepts so far with much more to come.


I did this concept at the very beginning of the project but i have forgot to show it of. but here she is the bookshop owner who is one of the main characters in the film. 


The Interior of the Bookshop 


The missing wall that The camera is looking from in the previous concept.

Boots For The Body 
The Interior of the flat where the body and head live which is situated opposite the bookshop. 



   Building Concepts, influenced by Falmouth




All of my concept Art and 3d work are now on ArtStation! feel free to check it out. http://rhysharvey.artstation.com/ http://www.artstation.com/artist/RhysHarvey





Saturday 22 November 2014

Headless Update: getting the right style

Its been a while since I posted about the Headless project and a lot has happened.

Being the director and art director on this project i have had a lot of work to do and have found myself telling people what to do more than working specifically on anything. Of course the main role of the director and art director is to keep everything looking the way that i want it and for the story to say what i want it to say and being caught up in doing the animatic and storyboard constantly i have done the character designs quickly in order to get the characters modelled so they can then be rigged. But it wasn't until i looked back on my original designs that i realised the 3d models didn't look anything like the original concepts i created.

here is the turnaround i did for the head.




And a few stills of the 3D Model in progress Created by Alan Ation



then the finalised 3D Turnaround of the head.



After looking at these for a while thinking there was something not right about the character i realised that they where far from the original concept that i did myself. Just being caught up in doing everything else i missed over the important aspects of my original design which i liked so much. So i went back and studied my original concept thoroughly. 


Looking at this and having it stuck to the side of my monitor i soon realised what was missing in my first head character turnaround. It was the small things like the positioning of the eyes, ears,mouth and nose. The shape of the ears and how square they are, the shape and size of the eyes and so on. 

To gett a better idea of how this concept to be created in 3d i got my hands on some clay and created this head character as a real 3d object that i could continue to look at for reference and understand more how it could work. 



Although This was a very quick clay sculpt i was happy with the outcome and it helped me see where i went wrong and how it could be fixed. 
The next stage i took was to re create this clay sculpt in Mudbox as a 3d sculpt that I could refine even more.


This Sculpt was simple but achieved the more innocent and charming character that i was going for and as you can see from the old and new next together the change made a difference and is now more like my original design.  










Sunday 2 November 2014

Headless Concepts and Art Direction

Before i Pitched This as an idea i spent a long time refining what style i wanted it to be in, i had the style in my head and eventually got it down on paper.

the style is a mixture of artists work that i have seen but all with this similar look using pastel colours with an edgy painterly look to it.

Style reference. 











So After studying images like the ones above I re did some of my old concepts and tried to get this style in there. I Have see this style  a lot now i have been looking for it but im hoping that taking reference from a combination of them and creating this in 3D with give it a slightly more original take on it.  

Here is all the concepts so Far for headless all created by me. 












Concept art is something that I have always loved doing and is something I wish to do a lot for this film. But being the director and sorting the story out at the same time is making it difficult to create the concepts along side all the other work. The concepts are a key thing to have so modellers can then create the stuff in 3D and keep to the style but at the moment the modellers are quicker at doing the work than there is concepts being produced so I have started to recruit extra concept artists and am still looking for more. 

Flat design

A key part to the story is figuring out how everything is going to work in 3D and how things are going to work together in a way that the story makes sense within the environment. The flat interior was one of those environments that had to be right and fit with the style, i didn't have the time to design this so i got a second year on board 

Katie Wyman, who is brilliant at concept work and i asked her to design the interior of the flat, at this stage it was just a plan to get an idea of where everything would happen. 

I gave her information about what was going to happen in the story and what we would need where and this was the result. 

it may not seem like much at the moment but i was very pleased with it as it all works perfectly and fits with everything around the story that will take place in the apartment. 




Headless

Its been a while since my last blog post so here is an update on everything.


My Pitch for the short film headless was successfully and is now in the making!
After I was told that my film was chosen to go through me and Toby Ellis started to think about who we would need on are project and started recruiting a team. Being one of the only 3D films that was chosen i had the opportunity to have some very talented 3D people working on this film.

I have taken the place as director and art director working mainly on the story so for but also over seeing how everything is looking doing concepts and will eventually be doing alot of texture work as this is something im keen to get into.

The Team

Me : Director/Art Director

Toby Ellis: Co-Director, head modeller, texture artist

Matteo Veglia: Producer

Tony Walker: Character Rigger

Alan Towndrow: Character Modeller/environment modeller

Elliot Forrest: Environment/ vehicle modeller

Jacob Pickering: Environment/ Vehichle Modeller



so that's the core team so far who are all very talented and are doing a brilliant job in there roles so far, being a big job to create a short 3d animation within this amount of time the people who work on this project will grow more and more when different jobs need to be done.

Tuesday 26 August 2014

Headless Short film

In a few weeks time I will be pitching my idea for a short film in front of my fellow class mates and an industry panel so i thought its time to make my idea more interesting and refined. 
the rough outline of the story ....

He is the only person in the world to be born with their head detached from their body, but the head and the body have two separate personalities, desires and attitudes. They never get on with each other but need each other to do everyday tasks. How will they learn to live with each other and become one person?

Im really excited about this idea but i'm more excited about creating a world and characters that are visually stunning. I am planning on creating the film in 3D and it will range between 3-4 minutes  long. Although it will be in 3d Im planning on sticking with a more stylised look inspired by many different artists. i have collected a range of images which can bee seen on my pintrest board http://www.pinterest.com/rhysharvey/headless-film-inspiration/. But recently I have been more inspired by the work of an artist called Goro Fujita, check out his blog http://chapter-56.blogspot.co.uk/


A back alley of the setting of my film inspired by the beautiful cornish seaside town Falmouth, where i am very luck to be living. 




The body of the main character.



The Building that the main characters the head and body live. 


Fxu Freelance Animation

A while back i was asked to create a short animation by my universities student union, Falmouth & Exeter student union (FXU) the animation had to promote there advice and welfare services and the style was my choice. I wanted to use this opportunity to try  out a different style and experiment with fluid moving 2d animation. I used Tv paint and i was inspired by the work of crcr http://www.crcr.fr/ a small animation company with a very distinctive style. So here is the short animation that I created from scratch from the beginning concepts to the final edit.





I was very happy to be given this opportunity as i had the chance to do everything on this short animation which was a nice experience as i only had to rely on myself and although there was a deadline i could work at whatever pace i wanted and had that freedom to create what i wanted. As long as the clients where happy with what i was putting into the animation.

Thursday 14 August 2014

Some random sketches

So its been a long time since i posted anything on my blog. I set myself a drawing challenge a long time ago and haven't really stuck to it and have decided to have another go at it. but here are a few sketches of random thing i have done over the last couple of months in my lovely sketch book.






Sunday 22 June 2014

Go Pro

I recently hired out a go pro from the university for the day doing a bit of sea swimming down here in beautiful Cornwall, and decided to edit together a short video of the footage. I haven't edited a video together with music for a long time and really enjoyed putting this little one together.


Monday 16 June 2014

Oceans in Peril

The ocean acidification project in collaboration with the university of west England animation that I had been doing background art for is now complete and has finally been released for the eyes of the public. I and pleased that I was a part of this project and overall really happy with my work being used to help this video, promoting the awareness of ocean acidification from the shark and coral conservation trust.


Tuesday 27 May 2014

Fluid Animation Test

A short animation test I did for morphing fluid animation. I have always loved fluid animation and animated  2d fx and now I have the opportunity to do a short animation for are universities student union i have decided to make the style very similar to the company crcr's style. With everything very fluid and morphing from one thing to the other. http://vimeo.com/50931167

Inspired by this animation I created a simple morphing animation in a way like the text at the end of the lowdi video.


DEEP Intro

Hand in time has come and gone and the deep intro scene is finally finished, well to what we could do within the time. I am really pleased with how the final render came out, it was a big learning curve for me as I had to learn a lot of Maya that I wasn't very comfortable in. But once I learnt it it was easy to get on with and I now feel comfortable in Maya when it comes to projection mapping and texturing. Here it is are finished group intro scene for deep.







Tuesday 20 May 2014

HEADLESS

Its close to hand ins now and I have done a few concepts for key aspects in the story and have done a quick character design for the girl in the story, here are the concepts I have done for this project so far and some ones i did a while back which I forgot to post.