05 // Selecting a brief: Scene Design for Film - Death Dealer

It took a while, but I've finally decided upon the brief that I will tackle for this part of the course. After being stuck between choosing from so many exciting briefs, I eventually settled with "Concept Design 1; Scene Design for Film", my focus directed toward the Death Dealer series of books by James Silke.

The reason that this brief stood out to me is that as a kid, I was brought up on the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan movies, so the fantasy genre has always been quite dear to my heart. In some ways, while the genre has blossomed in many different directions of late, I kinda miss the old ways - movies like Krull, Clash of the Titans, Sinbad, etc all had a real nice grasp of fantasy as being simply fantasy. Nowadays however, there's a need for fantasy storytelling to be grounded in some kind of reality - alternate or not. Things have to make sense and be explainable/believable for the audience to like it and/or agree with it. I get it, but I don't like that approach. I miss the old ways, where stuff just happened, regardless of it making much sense or being physically possible.

And so, upon hearing of the Death Dealer series, I knew this would be the right choice for me. Combined with environment design, I figure this brief will supply me with plenty of opportunity to enhance my skills in set design and digital painting, based around a subject that is sure to inspire me immensely.

My first task was to pick up a copy of the book. Through Amazon I managed to source out the first two novels; Prisoner of the Horned Helmet and Lords of Destruction. On my daily commute to Abertay, I'll read through both of these and pick out some key scenes that I think will be worth portraying.

As well as these books, my preliminary research will also include looking at shots from the Game of Thrones show and the more recent Conan movie.

Recommended by another tutor, I picked up a copy of Setting the Scene, a book that goes into great detail about the techniques and thought processes behind scene-building for animation, film and games. This could prove to be an invaluable resource when combined with all the other resources I have amassed of late. Oh, and not forgetting the art book for Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2 game, which has a heap of incredible concept and production images of environments that will provide serious inspiration for my own project.

Finally - for this segment - I will shortly be placing my order for some of Gnomon Workshop's educational videos. Most notable are a series of videos by Feng Zhu, which focus on his techniques for producing environment drawings and paintings for film and game production. I selected his videos over all the others as lately my style of artwork has tended towards linework driven, high detail, dynamic compositions, which is also a favored approach by Feng. It is an industry-recognised style that I intend to pursue for the foreseeable future, therefore it made sense for me to apply it to this project too.