Thumbnail Revisions

Thumbnailing is never done! I spent some time this week figuring out some momentum and motion in some of the scenes.

Depression and Letting Go

The poses this week were to study the emotion of depression, but then also letting go. I thought that depression would be giving up and sitting down, getting as low as possible. Letting go to me meant actually releasing physically, or opening the hands, almost setting free. I also have 3 poses here for the bargaining stage of depression, which to me, meant that he would try to rebuild the snowman.

Pose Studies

These poses explore emotion poses for the opening and ending scenes. In the opening scene he is happy building a snowman, then in the ending scene he interacts with the snowman during his 'bargaining' phase of grief. I'm exploring using the 5 stages of grief to motivate his poses in the ending scene, so far I've got drawings for depression, denial, anger, and bargaining. The next set of acting studies that I'll make will be the 'acceptance' stage of grief, since that is almost another act in this scene I'll focus on those throughout the next week.

Scene Studies

The following drawings were made to study actions in several of the scenes. The first page has drawings of the boy just after he's found the gun and is showing how cool he is by doing some 'gunslinger poses', the second page shows him 'tripping' and losing control of the gun. The third page has Danger bouncing around 'playfully' and then dashing with more 'sharpness'.

Snow Storm Photo Set

A lot of things in Minnesota were canceled today due to extreme weather. I bundled up and got outside right at sunrise to take inspiration pictures and man I'm really happy how they turned out. I'll be borrowing a lot of shapes from the snow drifts and even some color. I like how the morning blues look and even some nice yellows to warm it up. I was glad I took these at sunrise before the sun got too high and the reflected light became blinding making it impossible to take good pics.

Looking at some of the color from my snowstorm pics, it made me think about the overall color of my work for this film, and I decided to put together some other nice winter scene pics that I found on google. This new package of inspiration I think will lead to some more artistic color choices.

3D Previs

I've collected some of the 3D assets that I've used along the way to help with character placement in perspective, scale, and posing. 3D artist Shannon Gilley was kind enough to provide the models and rigs of the characters.

Character Expressions

I feel like this film will live or die by the interactions of the characters, so I spent almost a whole summer in the sketchbook trying and testing all kinds of acting moments with the characters. While a lot of these poses might not make the final film, I learned a lot about what sort of expressions and angles work for what I have in mind.