24/09/15 - Meeting with Ryan

Today I met with Ryan Locke to discuss the ideas and thoughts I had for my project. I explained how I wanted to create a strong portfolio piece, predominantly 2D concept art/visual development for film and games. I also explained how I was interested in different visual cultures and how they were used in current film/games. We discussed how a lot of cultural overlap happens without the viewer even noticing, and how it is used to create depth and help build a world.
An alien bar scene would seem bland without prethought to the worlds that each alien belongs to, and dressing them accordingly. Adding symbols and glyphs invented or borrowed from other cultures has been used throughout entertainment history, with most movies paying homage or referencing to other, older movies pretty much all the time. I found through experimenting with patterns and layers, I could add depth to silhouetted characters almost instantly.

So combined with my drive to produce concept art and my interest of cultural influence, I have composed a bunch of questions to do with my project:

• How does cultural influence improve depth within concept art?
• What IS culture?
• How is a culture defined?
• What is it that we as the viewer recognise as "culture" within a piece of art/concept/scene
• Which cultural traditions and visual iconographies are most present in current media (film/games)
• How does one "build" a culture in order to create character/world concepts?

What is culture? - A definition

Culture can be defined in a hundred ways, and my aim is to narrow this down to the barest of ideas and learn to build it back up from there. When I think of culture, I imagine textiles, patterns and dress. I imagine being able to look at something, whether that is a place or a person or a vehicle, and know it's history or location of origin by aesthetic alone. This is my own visual bias. Culture is more of what makes up a group of people, not singularly how they look. Culture forms from a group of people, and their traditions, religions, beliefs.

According to an article by Livescience, culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people. This is defined by language, religion, attire, music, art, and everything else that makes up a "people". We can see this in modern day. As many different cultures emigrate from their homes and travel across the globe, larger countries become more culturally diverse. Even in Dundee, I see different ethnic groups, different collections of people. Each of these groups belong to and possess a "culture" that makes up who they are. This culture is past, present and future.

My goal currently is to properly refine and categorise all the aspects of what makes a "culture", and to create a list of subcategories that I can investigate in detail.

OpenCulture Star Wars Article

So today I encountered this article whilst searching the internet for articles and books on culture inspiration in film/games. Immediately I was intrigued to discover that the Star Wars series was directly inspired by Japanese samurai!
I learned that the series of movies were directly inspired by the Japanese movies being produced in the 1950-60's by director Akira Kurosawa.
Kurosawa was famous for taking inspiration from American westerns and detective movies to tell stories of Japanese samurai. In his prime, Kurosawa had wanted to produce western-style movies in Japanese theatre. At this time, Japan was at war with multiple countries, and had a heavy censorship on media release. Kurosawa was only able to release his films if they were heavily injected with war propaganda. It was only after the war that Kurosawa was finally able to release the western-styled movies that he had originally wanted to create.
His film Rashumon was suggested to be entered into the runnings for Venice Film Festival, which it won. After this, the film industry became obsessed with Japanese movies and a boom of samurai and Japanese romance films flooded the theatres. This influx of japanese movies inspired young film producer George Lucas to make a "space opera" about samurai in space.

Physical Resemblance

Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers are both modeled to look like Samurai armour. The helmet shape is the most obvious, with the large sweeping rim a direct inspiration from traditional Japanese helmets.

Above: Some notes I made on stormtrooper/samurai armour comparison. Note the layered segments and bell-shaped helmet.

Above: Basic shape armour breakdown and comparison. 

Lightsabers are samurai swords, this is a given.

Character design/attributes

(additional top knot added)

Above: These characters and this scene are inspired from 2 wandering peasant characters from Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress".

This is more character inspiration that visual, but even Kurosawa's use of a large character against a smaller one echoes R2-D2 and C3PO.

I painted over an image of a sandtrooper to demonstrate how easily the imperial armour could translate into Japanese samurai armour.

Textile Research

This week i've been reading Sheila Paine's Embroidered Textiles. This is a large collection of stitch, pattern and other media depicting various eras of history and culture. It provides a wide array of images and technical explanations, often providing the history and function of each item. Traditional outfits like the Japanese Kimono and Native American dress are covered as well as Turkish robes, Chinese dress and more. This book has provided a useful insight into the different designs and purposes of historical wear, as well as specific guides on pattern and colours for each time period.

Above: Front cover of newest reference book!

I used this book as reference to paint some pattern studies. I found these useful not only for practice but to later use as texture overlays in concepts. To create these, I used a variety of photoshop brushes to try and replicate the traditional patters.

I used the textures as overlays to add detail and motif's to base character silhouettes. This created an interesting layer of depth and provided strong inspiration for clothing details and colour pallettes. 

To create these, I placed each texture in a variety of ways and played with Photoshop's layer settings until I felt the image felt right. After this I painted additional details using these as a template. These designs were mostly Indian inspired, with some Scandinavian geometry thrown in.

I am very happy with these results. I feel that the addition of the patterned textures have greatly added depth to the silhouettes, and from this point I can take the forms further, using light and form to further build on the characters. These were sketched with Jack the Giant Killer in mind, as I tried to incorporate different Asian cultures whilst keeping with a "lone hero giant killer" idea.

Today with Lynn we were tasked with creating a "jellyfish" (essentially a very open mind map).
This involved asking ourselves questions based on our project, and writing them down.
Initially I found this difficult as I wasn't entirely sure what sort of questions to be asking,
But after some discussion I managed to fill the page. After this, the questions were sorted into themes, Personal, Industy, Technical etc.

Little messy (this was advised) but the main questions I got of this are:

Technical = How do I make my concept pipeline(s) more efficient and consistent
                    How to keep my art style consistent throughout character/environment/comp
                    How do I achieve a more balanced colour pallette?
                    How do I generate multiple usable outcomes from a concept?

Personal =  How do I make myself more employable?
                   How do I justify all this with a question?

Theoretical = How can I create new and inspiring concepts using a previously established theme?
                       How to research traditional cultures and incorporate this into my designs?
                 

Stuff i've been working on!

Some recent sketches/pieces i've been working on, taking into consideration my "character" pinterest board, using lots of dynasty-era asian clothing and armour as inspiration. This is mostly just to get myself back into the swing of character design whilst I wait to speak to a lecturer!

Jack the Giant Killer - Adaptation

A lot of people know this tale, or at least the latest retelling of it.

The original Jack and the giants story dates back to the early 18th century, where Jack was a commonly used character in puppet shows, depicted as a cunning young man who frequently outsmarted multiple-headed giants with ease and finesse.

This simple plot device was remade, republished and refreshed throughout the 18th century, with instances of Jack and Giants cropping up with nearly every new edition of children books. It is speculated that the public had grown weary of tales of King Arthur, the original giant slayer, and Jack was created as a new entity to depict these stories.

 Jack is renown for slaying specifically British giants, most of which resembled giant hairy men, often with multiple heads.




I would like to reinvent this story, drawing inspiration from other cultures and pulling Jack away from traditional British folklore.
As I said in a previous post, British armour and weaponry is not particularly interesting to me, and I would love to completely turn this tale on it's head. 
(see image on left, hehe)

Pinterest Research!

I've been using Pinterest to quickly collect lots of reference on characters, creatures and composition pieces that inspire me for this project. These ideas are still loose as I have yet to discuss my plans with a module tutor!

These boards can all be found at https://uk.pinterest.com/cthulew/