a farm concept

#1

I’m an animation student going through his final project, and I’m now designing the environment for my short video,

the story is of a father and his wild son who work in a farm. the father tries to teach his son about the importance of taking care of the crops but his son just wants to play and while doing so wrecks the farm.

I want the environment to be playful, to match the son’s spirit, but I want the colors to emit a rather “boring” feel to the world, to go with the father’s working image.

I wanted to ask you guys if you have any tips for improvement, in any aspect. lighting, colors, perspective, design, etc…

thanks :slight_smile:

#2

Can you link us up with some of your animation work? I love looking at all skill levels of animation since I fail completely every time I try.

As for your farm scene. The foreground values could be pushed a bit more to help convey depth. Here’s a quick task you could try that’s similar to how I test out value ideas. Duplicate all the layers of your illustration and merge the duplicates into one layer. Go to levels adjustment menu.

This tool.

Under the black, mountanous looking histogram thing, click and drag the center grey triangle slowly to the right. Just a tad, you won’t have to move it very far. You can also drag the white triangle on the far right towards the center one if your lightest values start getting too dark. Once things have been darkened a little, confirm the changes. Now with a big fuzzy round brush erase the top portion of the layer that contains all the background elements. You may need to tinker with the layer’s opacity setting as well if it’s too dark.

Hopefully what you’re left with will give you some idea of what darker values for your foreground would look like.

If you already know all this stuff, then just ignore me. Good luck with your final project!

#3

Thanks Zombie for your comment.
cant say I did well during my studies, but you can still see some of my works here:
http://bendador.wix.com/cymps
and here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/cymps
I’m hoping to compensate for this on my current project ^^"

as for your comment, I know the technicals but I appreciate your comment about pushing the BG back, I’ll give it a try :slight_smile:

PS:

your gallery is beautiful!

#4

You might also want to check the consistency of the lighting in your scene. Your cast shadows don’t line up and even the quality of the shadow differs, jumping from defined and hard-edged to diffused and vague, even when there are no changes in lighting from area to area (such as a break in an overcast sky so that some areas are getting direct sunlight while others are getting diffused overcast lighting).

Readability is also a bit weak, with some areas lacking proper definition so we can actually identify what they are. It’s fine to be painterly, but you need to also create enough readability with your expressive brushwork. Sloppiness and vagueness is not the same thing as expressiveness, and too many people mistakenly confuse the two.

#5

thanks a lot for your comment lunatique :slight_smile:

how can I make it read better? should I for example, add more detail to the tomato field?

#6

Think about what makes any shape or shapes that form a recognizable object unique, and how much you can simplify before it loses the qualities that makes it recognizable. That is your threshold for how much detail you can simplify before it is no longer readable. Do this for everything in your scene, while keeping in mind the overall consistency of your stylistic choice, so that you don’t over-detail one area and make it stick out too much.

#7

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