OUAN505 - Research, Mood Boards

In order to set the tone early on in the project I created some mood boards on various aspects of the production that I thought could make use of some inspiration in the form of imagery and colour palettes. At this early stage I like creating mood boards or image boards so that I get a sense of what I'm aiming for. I chose to do four in total, depicting trees from North America, trees from the Amazon rainforest, an art style we liked as a group and some detailed paper cuts, as that is also a technique that we were interesting in looking at using. Overall I'm happy with how they turned out. I think they set the tone I was hoping for and seeing the images together like that, although all different, I feel come together and demonstrate the vast amounts of visual references and inspiration that is available to us.

This is the first mood board that was created, based on the trees of North America. As the topic of our documentary is deforestation, early on I had envisioned the North American pine trees as the trees that would be suit featuring in the documentary because they're so iconic and recognisable, especially when thinking about the dense woodland of North America and the deforestation that does occur there. I tried to gather a range of images, some inside and outside the forests as well as some areas that had been affected by the act of deforestation. Furthermore, I was looking specifically at colours and the different tones of the trees in order to try and determine how I was going to colour the trees. The original plan was to cut them straight from coloured card and paper but some small tweaking of the colours in the post-production stage might be necessary to bring the quality up. Ultimately the mood board dedicated to North American forests will provide a great resource when it comes to needing reference imagery to design assets for the production process. Furthermore, the moods and colours that they depict translate a lot in terms of the colours, lighting and atmospheres that I hope we can recreate in our documentary.

The next mood board I created for the initial research stage of the production was based on the Amazon rainforest. The reason for collecting imagery related to this is that the Amazon rainforest plays a large part in terms of the amount of deforestation that occurs and due to its importance and relevance in our project, I thought it was important to include. Unlike the images for other forests this is so vast that the majority of the photographs are taken from an aerial view. One of the things I liked about these images was the shape and appearance of the river from above, it looks like a curve has been cut away from the forest, this is something that I want to incorporate into the animation, as a way of giving a sense of scale. In contrast to the first mood board I also noticed that the colours of rainforest trees are quite a lot lighter than the evergreens. This will be something to consider when designing the different assets. Some of the more revealing images I found of the rainforest and the deforestation that occurs there show baron wastelands of dirt and sand where there was once a dense forest. Several shots of burning forest also revealed the scale and damage forest fires can do in closely packed forest locations too. Overall, this mood board demonstrated to me the scale of the forests that are affected, and the damage that is done to certain forest areas by methods of deforestation. I think the mood board comprises a good range of reference and imagery for inspiration for the section of the documentary focused on the Amazon rainforest.

During the very first conversations we had as a group, we mentioned that we like the gravity falls art style and wanted to somehow incorporate the relatively simple colours, and shapes in combination with the lighting they use. One of the things I liked about the style they use is that each scene has it's own colour palette and works well as an individual scene. Another reason gravity falls became a reference was the fact it's set in a forest and a huge number of scenes involve a forest or some kind of heavily wooded environment. The translates well into our documentary on deforestation in which the scenes will mostly consist of forests and trees. The scenes also look quite dramatic and often have a large sense of scale.

Finally, I produced a mood board to highlight the technique we were looking at along with the work of an artist named Maude White, who creates intricate paper cuts of various things. The reason I wanted to assemble imagery related to paper and paper cutting was that at this point we were experimenting with the idea of creating the entire animation from paper. It was interesting to see the limitations of what it could be used for, and some of the things that I've looked at that have been produced have been incredibly detailed, showing what can be achieved with the medium.