Notes from the Field: The Process

Color me silly but I think I enjoy the process of making something over actually making it. Maybe that's why I'm never satisfied with the end results. The journey is always more exciting than the destination.

Like everything that's worth doing and will take up a majority of your time, money, and life it's good to have a plan. With the script in hand and ideas swirling in my head I break down everything from Scott's writings into a list of things to design. Initially I took two weeks to knock everything out in the order that it happens in the story. I have no idea why I did it that way, except maybe to recreate the impact that it had in my gut. Speaking of which sometimes at this point I create inspirational art to set the Artistic Vision of the book that everything will filter through.
Once I get the overall look and feel of the book, in this case I was shooting for a Neo-Deco experience. Think Hugh Ferriss, Raymond Loewy, and Arthur Radebaugh and you'll have an idea of where I was heading. What I liked about that period was that sci-fi and noir were equally ominous and in films lit similarly. Like "Things to Come" and "Alphaville" I wanted to capture a bizarre crossbreed that could make this future seem likely if our evolutionary path was slightly different.

Now the whole time I'm doing production design I'm thinking about characters and their relationship to each and the world around them. In terms of relationship to each other each character has a trait that another character shares. Whether it's a hair curl, or the shape of the cheek bones, I tried to create a visual relationship that attached them, while pushing other details further apart so that in silhouette they were significantly different. In my first round I try to cartoonify them to the point where it's clear their shapes are different from each other.

One thing I should note though, over the past 20 years or so Scott has had a significant input on designing some of the key characters. Dmitri for one was clearly Scott's idea, but even from his initial drawings he's changed somewhat. A lot of the other characters were brought on by me, either inspired by Scott's words or a sketch that sparked a direction.

Since Blogger is wimpy and won't let me post more than one image, I'll see about a second post with more character art.

Until next time...

=s=