Digital Environments: November 2010

Hey digital environments followers, as I told you before I had the very fortunate job of designing concept art for our project. And today I am very happy to present to all of you the concept art of drawings I made, from pictures of when we went to the British Museum and the London Zoo, as well as the pictures I collected from the internet of African art and mammals. Also I have a some designs of stuff that I thought my group had in mind for the project. What you'll see is some pieces of the final ideas that were picked and some that weren't. I shall be guiding you this time through all the images I'll be presenting to you, so I hope you enjoy the pics you see and this is very cool because this is the first time that I'll be showing all of you my drawing style. So hope you like them, if not that's cool.

These are carved statues from the British Museum that I drew because I had this idea that we could make the trees in our made up Africa be made up of African carvings like these ones that's very similar to the 'Tree of Life' that they have at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park, although that tree is made up of animal carvings, I thought we could do the same but with African carvings.

This is an image from all the other images I took from pictures of African artwork from the internet that I tried to duplicated here, same with the one down below. I had another idea which you'll see in my drawings later on, which is incorporating African patterns into the landscape.

These African pieces here, some of them were ideas I had for what the animals or the Maasai tribe might look like in our film, if you notice the leopard statue and the human figurines.

This as you can tell is the African map but underneath it is, well first of all what you need to know is that again if you need reminding is that we're not making actually Africa, we're making something similar to Africa. So I took this idea to make an African map of our own and one that could be shaped like an animal, but my group thought that idea was a bit to extreme, so the idea of this and the design below of the Island shaped like an elephant's head and the one above shaped like a lion's were both scrapped.

This is the design for what our trees will look like taken from a sculpture we saw at the British Museum.

These drawings here were based off of cave paintings we saw at the London Zoo, and I was told that my group wanted to make the animals in our film look a bit like silhouettes or shadow puppets, I had this idea that they could look like these cave paintings of animals but the animals from African cave paintings which is what I tried to make these look like.

These are three designs of a Warthog, one in the middle is based on the real life version, the one on the top left corner is a silhouetted version and the other one in the bottom right corner is a silhouetted version from an African painting. I drew these three to see which one our character sculpture Perri would use or see if she could take the one in the middle and make it into something of her own design. In the end though we never used a warthog, we only wanted to use a few animals and those that defined Africa, and we didn't really think the warthog was one of those.

This is a meerkat, that we scrapped in the end.

This is the African wild dog which we also didn't use.

These are fennec foxes, which we also didn't use.

In the end these were the animals we will be using, these are drawings I made of the real animals that I would give to Perri and then she we model them into her own. This is a zebra.

This is a lioness.

This is a ganu or the wildebeest as it's mostly known as.

This is a crocodile.

Fish Eagle.

And finally the elephant.

This is the first concept drawing I made of the opening shot where we have a line of wildebeest with the sun rising up behind them. This was based on something I saw in a local paper of a photograph of a line wildebeest on a grassland at night that you could just see quite clearly. I thought we should use that for our opening shot so it wouldn't look the famous opening to "The Lion King".

This is a bird's eye shot for our African world.

This is from the idea I had of the trees having African carvings on them, so this is an idea of what that would look like.

This is putting the African symbols on not just trees but rocks as well, but the idea is that they appear that much, they would be slightly there otherwise it would all look like 'I just can't wait to be king' from "The Lion King".

This is an idea for what a member of the Maasai tribe would look based off of what they look like in an African painting. Also above is the branch of an African tree with a carving of a African figure based off of the idea of making the trees have African carvings on them as I said before.

This is a shot from the storyboards where we have the crocodiles lurking in the water spying on a herd of wildebeest that you can see in up ahead. Also if you notice the African carvings on the boulder which a croc is sitting on, gives you an idea of what we've got in mind.

This is an idea for African patterns appearing on grass.

This is an idea of a possible ending shot of two members of a Maasai Tribe next to our African tree, with the moon in the background and again there's African symbols in the moon rocks to keep the feel that this could all look like an African painting brought to life.

This is another bird's eye shot of wildebeest running and if you look at the mountain on the left, there's a massive African painting right onto the centre of it, based on an idea I had that the African painting could somehow be expanded so that it would fit onto the side of the mountain.

Hey guys just a brief backdrop on what's been happening, yesterday on Monday we took a trip to the British Museum and yesterday we went to the London Zoo. My job on this project is the concept designer so what everyone in my group even though I couldn't do it myself was that they took photos of what they saw and what I can incorporate into the design of our piece. I was before I begun designing able to take notes and ideas of what my group leaders James and Gary have in mind. I also took down ideas from myself and Perri who is our character modeller and set decorator. From what i've learnt this is what the idea is in general, the Serengeti has to of course give you the feel of you looking at a piece of African art, so what I have to try and and do is take pieces of african art which you're about to see which is stuff I've taken from the internet as well as the photos my group members took at the British Museum and incorporate some of it into the landscapes. So here's pieces of African Art I've taken from the internet;