Environment Design

Today I spent some time looking into the backgrounds that would be required for my animation. Due to my story's lack of traditional characters, I feel that my use of environment design and backgrounds will contribute strongly to the narrative, as there will be less emphasis on the foreground and more emphasis on the world as a whole.

First of all; I used my initial storyboard (click here to see the blog post about my initial storyboard) to ascertain what environments will be required for my animatic - which, unlike my animation, will feature all of the backgrounds in the story. These are the backgrounds required:

• A long panning shot of a vast grassy area with mountains on the horizon; this is where the hut is originally placed
• The bottom of the cliff; where the hut falls into the sea
• An Antarctic scene, clear in the middle for the hut to float through yet with a piece of land/ice in the foreground to allow the seal somewhere to sit
• A second Antarctic scene; this is where the cliff will be where the hut is eaten by the whale. This scene features a zoom - as such the background had to be designed quite large with this in mind.

I then set about collecting references images and pieces of inspiration from online - primarily using the website 'Pinterest' as an image source. Here are the key images that inspired my background art:

This image ended up being a particularly notable piece of inspiration,  directly influencing the layout for my panning background for scene 1

While this image was captured from a completely different angle to the way the landscape will be portrayed in my animation, it still caught my attention for the similarity of the environment and the amazing autumnal pallet seen in the trees and foliage; this is a colour scheme I would very much like to implement in my final animation.

I loved this image of the Antarctic. The landscape is baron and empty; which is perfect for what I'm trying to convey, however there is a beautiful depth to the photograph, the combination of thick fog and a distant landscape conveys a fantastic feeling of mystery and potential for adventure.

Here I once again wanted to look into how to draw my cliff faces, in addition to this I also wanted to investigate how water looks when it meets with the bottom of a cliff; with waves crashing and frothing against the rock 

Here I once again wanted to investigate how I could represent antarctic waters, without just drawing a big empty landscape. I love the colour in this image, and the way the sky is so cleanly reflected in the water. Once again, the idea of distant shapes and landscapes is a key feature of this type of environment... 

...and continues to be in this image.

More investigation into how waves meet the bottom of a cliff; here I observed the jagged rocks that reach out of the waves at the bottom of the cliff, which I couldn't see in the previous image...

...However upon further inspection they are a fairly common element in such environments

These are the background images I ended up producing:

Above: Long panning shot of Scene 1 background

Above: Scene 2 background

Above: Scene 3 background

Above: Scene 4 background

I am very pleased with the way these pieces turned out. I had initially only intended to produced some quick illustrative pieces to portray the general feel of the environment, however I am confident that these pieces could be used for my animatic, and - with some enhancements including colour as well as some animation for added embellishment (primarily the movement of water and trees) - perhaps even my finished animation. I aim to experiment with the use of colour in these images at a later date.