The animation will be soon released in internet.
Meanwhile I want to show the work-flow of the painting procedure on one of these backgrounds I was doing. Here’s the working log for all you interested people :
Basically the characters are already thought out and shot, the King is lurking behind the tree, watching some guards. There is a camera-pan across the picture from left to right, with only minimum movement of the guards. The purpose is to show that the colony is actually keeping their people as slaves. And show with the kings following actions what his character is really like – how he reacts after seeing this. I did the quick sketch above to visualize my idea of the scene.
To speeden up my paintings, I use some photo reference. For example, the clouds and the mountains in the background were just photos blended in and painted on.
The next step is to check things like eye-movement, composition – will the audience read the picture fast enough etc.
I have to think about also how should I enhance the scene, to get the idea through correctly. Some tools, tents, camp-stuff or similar, fire somewhere (don’t know yet what is that smoking tower in the background), block of stones piled up together maybe? Some fence or ladders?
2nd go
Again back to the painting. After showing the sketch to people, the guards were actually mistaken as the slaves. This was also because there was not movement in the pit. So, I thought the atmosphere would need some more creepy touch to it :
Adding the hanging corpses to the background make it more clear that the place is not a happy summer camp after all. Also the camera pans first from left, showing the corpses thus creating the mood – and then lastly, shows the king hiding behind the tree.
My only concern is now that it might look now as if the king is on enemy’s land. This is made a bit clearer in the end narrator but still I’m thinking how should I enhance the picture that the King is actually spying on his own guards. Maybe a flag or a sign on their cloaks to make it more obvious that they are in the same league (and this must be hard for the viewer, who still thinks the king is a good guy).
Hmm.. I might just be doing that, actually.
3rd Go
Ok… Here’s what I have now :
So I changed some minor things to arrange the set better and make room for the slaves. You can’t see the slaves working from these small pictures – I made a really quick rig from a Lightwave sample of a male body (which I distorted a bit) :
I then animated couple of those slaves as if they were working in the pit.
nice job, and you short film at assembly was tha BEST!