Seems like the word of the week is "Shape". I wish it had been the word of the last couple years because I now see how important it is to drawing, painting, and overall design. The concept is still a little zygote in my mind. I need to take some time to nurture it, but I am really looking forward to the discoveries to come.
I've recently been brave (or foolish) enough to try figure painting with watercolours. Being inspired by the bold colours of Charles Reid's figure paintings, I've definitely taken some liberties here. I do not profess to have anywhere near Charles Reid's capabilities, but hey, 'ya gotta start somewhere. Plus, slapping colour around is fun, and that's what really matters in the end.
We've started digital painting classes at school, and I've also been taking Imaginism's digital painting course weekly. I'm learning all the fancy tools and tricks of Photoshop, and still feeling like a massive rookie. Nonetheless, I've produced a semi-finished painting. I feel it's a lie to call it a painting, as there was technically no paint involved and it's a grayscale. I've produced a jpeg. There that's fitting.
Being the over-zealous student I am sometimes, this is actually an extremely rough and early concept sketch for my fourth year film. You can never be too prepared, right? I'll fill you in more when I'm closer to developing the idea further. Until then, it's best I bond with PS often and extensively.
You know that feeling when everything starts to make sense? Yeah, neither did I...until today. I caught this video of a Lion King pencil test, and I saw what our teachers have been trying to drill into our vacant brains! In this clip I found the expected, pretty cleaned up animation, but I also saw storyboards in the reel which are in the exact format that Nancy Beiman has been trying to teach us and the pre-paint, toned layouts that Scott Caple has been demonstrating all year.
Nancy has been teaching us that it is the acting, action, and staging that happens in the boards, not necessarily the cinematography. Scott has been showing us that it is the layout man who decides which type of fancy camera angle and/or move is used and how to execute it. It all comes back to Disney, and I think it's clear from this clip that our teachers know what the heck they're talking about.
