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Elsinore - Wooden Houses - Animated Music Video




Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Backgrounds

After a brief hiatus to work on another video project, I am back to work on the Wooden Houses video. Over the past few days I've put these two backgrounds together.

I made this one first:
 This will be the second shot of the video. The pig stands at the wooden countertop to the right. He picks up a framed photograph which we have just seen in close-up in the first shot and then sets it down face down.

While working on this background I discovered that I have a tendency to fuss endlessly on details. As a result I spent far more time on this than I would have liked. As with everything on this project, though, I learned a lot in the process and will be able to do the same things faster in the future. I decided after this background that I would do an initial pass on each background and then go back later to do texturing and shading and to add other details. I think that way I'll be able to better allocate my time.

One detail I want to point out is the wine bottle. A few weeks ago, Kinzie and I were at a grocery store and decided to get a bottle of wine. We came across a bottle of red wine called "Special Pizza." Anyway, I decided it needed to go in the video:



I then started in on the first background of the video, a framed photograph.

At some point there will be a wolf and two pigs in the foreground of this photograph, but I need to get them to face forward first. I may also move the  text from the frame to a sign in the foreground in front of the characters. The Video will start showing only the word Elsinore, and the rest will fade into view as it zooms out to reveal the full frame. The pig's hand will reach in to pickup the frame. the video will then cut to the view in the first picture I posted.

This castle is traced from a photo of Elsinore Castle. while that can be a tedious and time consuming process in Illustrator I worked pretty quickly and didn't fuss over every detail of the castle and I was able to employ some of the tricks I picked up while working on the previous background.

I followed that up with the third background, in the hallway outside of the pig's apartment:



One thing that I realized while drawing the original background was that I don't really know how to draw things in perspective. I spent some time on some websites investigating vanishing point perspective. I may not add any detail to this hallway until I'm almost done with the video as I suspect I may have to cut this. As it stands, I'm worried I might not be able to start the song until about 20 seconds into the video. I'll have to get further in before I see how the timing works out.

I have a few other odds and ends completed including a walking pigeon and some new sketches, but those will have to wait for next time. 

1 comment:

  1. I thought I had posted a comment, but now it's not here... Save that wine label! I love the backgrounds. Thanks for reminding me of Elsinore Castle. I'll be googling it soon.

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