Random Story Notes Pages

Doing little rough thumbnails to inform some the moods/lighting/scenes so I could work out the costumes. Costuming is so informed by the environment, character, story and lighting so I need something to respond to as I narrow down my costume detail ideas. Here are some examples of the little abstracts I throw together and the resulting costume notes :)

Pattern Detail Sketches

Playing around with ideas for costume details, patterns and textures :)

Portrait Sketches

Early loose Blue Sky of a prehistoric planet

Swiss Family Concept - Refining

At this point I did another pass at the thumbnails. This may change as my speed in executing larger finished pieces increases but so far, if I can go back to thumbnails to solve a problem, it's the fastest way for me to narrow down my concepts. I'm very comfortable sketching small and it keeps me from getting caught up in the details before I have a overall silhouette/cut that is communicating. It's also freeing since I don't get attached to any idea when I spent less time on it. Keeps me from polishing something that is broken ;)

Swiss Family Concept

Just keeping it simple with the layouts. Like I mentioned before, only selections of these will be in the final portfolio but this is the sort of thing I enjoy on blogs so I figured I'd share it. 

Starting concept:

Robotic ad agency creating pitches for intergalactic tours ;)

My photo robots were fashion (costume) documentarians :)

Modified Concept:

So once I came on this really rough idea for Swiss Family Robinson I did quick little silhouettes, riffing off of Shaun and Keith's sketches...

...and started playing with a short script treatment. I ended up simplifying the role of the robots since that was a leftover from our original blue sky and I felt that I was rationalizing their photobot role too much. Once I had a basic story working I used that to sketch out some thumbnails of character moments/costume beats so I could further wrap my head around the characters and the themes of the story. 

I picked through the story thumbnails and took some of them further as I narrowed down my ideas. I also created a basic color map/guide for myself to inform the palette. I then took each character, picked the main emotions they arc through and did some little palette chips to inform their costume palettes for those moments.

New Portfolio - Progress

CTNX is fast approaching and I've been wrapping things up on my new portfolio pages. As I've been adding the last few pieces in, and plowing through a long list of edits, it's really cool to see it all starting to take shape. I've learned so much this year and have been blessed with time to really focus on finding a better personal process. It's been a lot of practicing, studying and experimenting but I feel like I'm starting to narrow down what works best for me and the best part is that it's giving me a clearer picture of the techniques/fundamentals to prioritize when I'm practicing. Maintaining momentum on this has been much easier with two good friends at my side. Shaun Bryant, Keith Zoo and I decided to work on a common concept so we could more easily riff, critique each other and brainstorm solutions when we got stuck.

The following images are a peak at some of the costume blue sky process. In our loose concept we had 4 main cultures. Futuristic tourists/space travelers ("Mobi Tours") and 3 prehistoric cultures on the planet they visit. Only some of this goes into the actual portfolio so I thought I'd share the approach I used for these on the blog. I really enjoy creating variations on a theme, so coming up with cuts/shapes that repeated within a culture, while maintaining a range of styles was really fun. You can see that I just reused the bodies for time's sake and there are still some edits here and there. Not worried about getting too detailed on these though since the purpose of these explorations was to just feel out the possible differences between the cultures and to create some general guidelines for myself moving forward.

My initial mood boards were just secret pinterest boards but I've included some of the revised location mood boards I created (after the culture concept pages were done). Looking back, pinterest was handy for gathering images but it's better for me to create a traditional board even in the blue sky stage. It can still be exploratory but putting it all on one clean document/wall forces me to edit earlier and keeps the designs tighter from the beginning. I found that I'd have to dig to recall an image I had wanted to use and it wasted time/killed momentum. I also had a clearer story in mind for these at this point since I eventually molded the loose "prehistoric tour" theme into a take on Swiss Family Robinson. After working out more of the story it was much more organic to edit the boards down. Just further validates that "Story is King".

I throughly enjoyed making these and I hope you enjoy them.
Swiss Family Robinson designs coming in the next post...

Upcoming projects

So I've been whittling away at a game plan for this year based on the feedback I got at CTNX. I picked out a few stories - Sleeping Beauty, Bearskin, The Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen, and Nicholas Nickleby - and have been busy gathering inspiration images and reference for the characters I'm planning to costume. Since I start with little rough thumbnail costumes you can expect lots of sketches like these in the near future ^_^