S T U D I O P R A C T I C E: OUAN05 - The Final Environment

Due to my bad planning for the first background I created, it didn't have the perspective I needed in order to observe two characters executing a fight sequence from the side-on perspective. Consequently, I've designed and created a new background image for the scene that is much more suitable given the perspective I designed for it. I've added two sketches of characters to confirm to myself that it would be eligible for using as a background. The camera angle I wanted to achieve for this scene was similar to the angle used in games such as street fighter where the camera is at a level with the characters and you can observe their movement from this perspective. However despite the animation only being twenty seconds long I want to make sure it doesn't feel boring or lose the tension when the fight sequence is active, so although this will be the view that will take up the majority of screen time I do plan on adding some close up shots also. This should be easy to add in as the close up shots take up a huge percentage of the screen and extra backgrounds don't need to be designed or implemented to accommodate for this change. As well as this the character models I want to use are very simple and won't require much detail even close up, I will probably use various Photoshop tools to make the characters quite uniform in colour, so as to not over complicate the animation.

The steps I took in producing the background for the final fight sequence were quite straight forward and had to be efficient so I could paint it in the few hours I had that day so I could move forward and begin animating.

I started by painting a base layer of a colour very slightly darker than pure white, the reason for this is because I wanted the scene to contain snow and have a winter feel so with that in mind I painted this in. From here I added in a structure to give the background a sense of scale and depth, I added this in just left of center - keeping in mind the rule of thirds and making sure the composition was appealing visually. The structure itself was influenced heavily by references of Japanese temples since that's the location that the fight sequence takes place, and using this kind of recognisable architecture made it so the location of the environment was apparent straight away. Next I added a second structure to increase the level of depth the painting had, as well as this I added in a layer of orange whilst altering the layer properties so that it gave the image a of time of day, and using this method with the sun I added in gives it a feeling of early morning of evening when thinking about times of day. The next step was adding touches of colour and adjusting things accordingly so that it was a stronger image overall, during this process I changed the tone of the sky and experimented with clouds but left them out ultimately. A silhouette of trees was added to the foreground to give the image an extra sense of scale and depth. Finally I experimented with snow and characters to make sure everything fitted appropriately and that the overall perspective of the image worked throughout and especially with the character models I added in the foreground to test this.