OUGD503 - Collaborative - Environment Development

After looking at the mood boards and research that the other members of the group had done I decided to go down a slightly different route for the environment backgrounds and use more geometry rather than abstract shapes. 

 

Initially I went for a very friendly look with lots of rounded corners and shapes and hardly any straight edges at all. Personally I really liked this idea because it reflects the tone of voice of the animation into the actual design itself. When I showed my peers they liked it however they felt that it was lacking a little. They told me that the environment needed to be made up of 3 different parts, one long section spanning vertically for the first pan of the animation, a section panning horizontally across the ocean floor and finally another section going down vertically for the deeper part of the ocean. This complicated things a little as the canvas would be mostly empty a part from a funny zig zag shape.

So I redid the environment in 3 different pages if you will. The pan down section from the horizon to the bottom of the ocean, the pan across section from the ocean floor across past our different areas of interest and then finally the pan down further section into the deep sea for the angler fish. 

I started working on the bottom ocean floor section first as I felt if I got this section right it would be easier to apply it to the other sections that needed to be done. I started off very paired back and simple as to not draw away from any of the animation. But the feedback that I got was that it needed more texture and depth.

Also when I showed the gym equipment, initially the animators wanted them to be at an angle however they found that this was hard to animate with in 2D so I had to change these to be from a side on perspective. 

For some extra texture I experimented with Brusho, which is a medium that I have not used before. The way the powder separates and spreads in the ink creates these fantastic colours and shapes that couldn't be replicated in any other way. This definitely could make the water look more like it is underwater rather than just a blue background which I feel that some of my original textureless backgrounds felt like. 

Though the brusho looks really effective, bright and colourful on its own when it's applied over the background it feels a bit out of place. Maybe its because everything else has a flat vector look, having something that is traditional media over it doesn't fit. So I'm going to try and experiment with vectorised textures. 

I started by adding some wavey shapes to make the water feel less like a backdrop and more like water. I also played around with the depth of the image by adding different layers of sand in both the foreground and the background. 

I also started to work on the theme park. I tried here to add quirky yet subtle touches to make it humorous for the audience. For example on the merry go round I used seahorses instead of normal horses and for the carriage for the rollercoaster (not pictured here) I named the rollercoaster "Poseidon's Big One". I hope that this friendly and funny tone of voice attracts the audience of 18-25 year olds.

So here was the first draft of sorts of the horizontal environment. Each time I get to a stage like this I upload the images onto a shared google drive so that everyone can see it and critique it. But I am pretty pleased with the resulting environment so far, I feel like it is not too overpowering to take over the animated divers yet sets the scene nicely.

Afterwards, I also altered the gym scene to fit the animators requirements and again for a bit more depth I've added some background elements to fill the scene a bit more. 

After finishing the horizontal section I felt more confident in applying the feedback that I had got from that to the first vertical section. In this section I tried to add a bit more life to the design by adding some fish in there, but they had to be removed in the end because they wouldn't be able to animate them. 

After having another meeting with my group they said that all of the backgrounds needed a lot more texture so I took them into photoshop to use texturised brushes. This meant that the environments were lower resolution as vectors but it allowed me to do a lot more with the brush tools. 

I added a lot more depth on the piece through the use of gradients and various grunge styled brushes. I'm really surprised with what a difference this has made from the flat environment to something that looks more 3D almost. 

I also went back to my horizontal environment and finished it off in Photoshop too in order to get a more textured and interesting design. As well as this I added a lot more objects into the background like rocks and seaweed to make the bottom of the ocean feel more alive. 

Now that I am confident with the backgrounds so far I just had to work on the deeper version. This is where the rollercoaster drops down further into the ocean to pan to the angler fish shot. This was possibly the easiest environment to do because it simply faded to black.