We were to create a collage that would represent opposites. I didn't want to use too many of the drawings so I picked life/death and heart/mind because I felt it would look nice together and thought it would communicate the theme well..
When working on composition I've noticed it looked like a playing card so I chose to use only red and black.
This week, instead of the whole figure, we focused on details, specifically face and hands.
For me those are some of the hardest things to draw. I often get the proportions wrong or the whole thing looks deformed.
At first we did some really quick face sketches. For the 20 sec. ones I only had time to draw a couple lines and they don't even look like faces. The longer sketches look a bit better, but it's obvious I don't have much practice in this area and will have to work on it a lot to get better results.
These two are my least favorite drawings from this lesson. The proportions aren't very accurate and the one on the right is slanting noticeably. The left one is a bit better, but the angle of her nose doesn't seem right, making the whole bottom half incorrect.
The profile drawings were a bit better, especially because in the first two I didn't have to focus on any other elements besides the outline.
I've always had trouble drawing hands. The top right drawing was the first one and I can see just how inaccurate it is. Some of the fingers look like they're broken. I struggled with the others too, but they do look better than the first one. The top left one was the last one and I am relatively happy with how it turned out. I didn't want to shade them smoothly to give them a bit of structure and I am glad i made that decision.
We could've never done it without the help of people who voluntarily played dead in public spaces in the middle of winter...thanks for dying for us!
Some things are not exactly as we wanted them, but we've done the best we could and overall we're happy with the final result. We've had 2 weeks to shoot the whole thing, most scenes had to be done during daylight and not everyone had time when we needed them so scheduling was a nightmare. The scenes with dead people were a bit awkward because there were people all around looking at us like we were crazy (who can blame them, though) and it was freezing so everyone just wanted to get it over with.
I could say that next time we'd try to plan ahead more, but there are things you just can't predict...like weather...and people not coming when they promised to...
It was definitely easier to make the animatic than to make this, but it was a good experience and we've learned that sometimes the best solutions are the stupid ones (if it works it's not stupid).
(Mostly) just for fun, here are the frames from animatic compared to how they ended up looking:
I think that all things considered, we've done a good job.
It wasn't easy, but it was a lot of fun...
Not gonna lie, I loved playing with the heart and fake blood (I loved having to wear just a t-shirt a lot less).
Me with my dad...
...Me with my dead dad...
fun fact: a lot of people thought they were drunk (my cousin shouting "look, drunk grandma!" didn't help)
..and it took us forever to set up the camera properly so they had to lie there for about 15 minutes (we're so sorry)
literally the only scene during which we weren't freezing.
(and our highly professional set-up)
on the other hand, walking down the square was the scene where we were freezing the most (big thank you to the people who kept pointing out that we must be freezing...we would've never realised without your help)
this was actually the best way to get rid of our height difference (and I only fell once) (don't mourn the books, it's Twilight)
For the scene with gas masks we did some test takes...in bathrobes
What better way to spend the day before Christmas than to have a bunch of people playing dead on the main square while you and your friend stand there in gas masks.
