Christmas Holiday Thumbnails

London Photos: Subway Study

Photos from my trip to London for architectural reference.

More Thumbnails and Yet Another Change of Principles! (The uncanny is a difficult subject to work with. :( )

I swear, I'm like a ditzy shopaholic woman who can't decide between one pair of shoes or the other...

At this point I began to think about reverting back to how I might display enclosed spaces and how I could distort them.

 I then took a look at the environments of the creepy Silent Hill environments and had a go at portraying those as I felt they gave of the sense of the uncanny. The first concept of basing my architecture around M.C. Escher proved to be a little more difficult, plus after a chat with Steven (I think that's his name. I can never remember the Maya tutor's name. So many Phils!), I was taught that making it obviously distorted and within the realm of nightmares wasn't the ideal way to make something look uncanny, plus the feedback from my OGR by tutorphil suggested I move back into the realm of reality with my architecture.

This was the resultant concept.

However, after a brief chat with Photoshop Phil, I realized that this was more leaning to the direction of obviously creepy; actually trying to get a creeped-out reaction from the viewer and trying too hard at that. I needed something more subtle.

I remembered something said previously during the course about places which are normally busy being completely devoid of people being creepy and after another chat, this time with my father who frequents the London Underground on his way to and from work, I got the idea to perhaps portray that exact scene: the underground tubes at night and completely empty.

Here are a few examples I found:

Ominous, no?

It's almost as if these tubes are haunted.

I plan to go to London on Thursday to take some photos for reference.

Maya: Treasure Island

Maya Fur Tutorial: Merry Christmas!

Unit 3: OGR

Unit 3 OGR

@Phil

I've finished my new Anatomy essay! Where exactly should I go to turn it in at college?

A Change of Direction, New Artist Reference and a Change of Design Principles

After doing two pages worth of thumbnails, I grey a little tired of seeing a post-apocalyptic world. Although there was something uncanny to it, there simply wasn't enough effect looking at the destruction of a city. It seemed a little cliche and seen too often. There wasn't enough I could do to the buildings to make them seem uncanny, abstract or surreal, so I began to look at various artists.

One particular artist that grabbed my attention was the surreal artist, M.C. Escher, most famous for his surreal paintings and drawings of surreal buildings with an almost optical illusion theme to them to fully confuse the viewer.

His sense of art is primarily explores impossible constructions, infinite architecture and tessellation.

I feel this would be a good artist for me to study during this project as his environments provide for many different and interesting camera angles from which to take tableau vivant-style scenes.

His most famous art pieces are depicted above. They give off a sense of the uncanny in the way they portray familiar styles of architecture, but at the same time twist them into something weird and unexpected to mess with what we perceive as normal. We see them as almost real, but the distortions of perspective and the laws of physics perplex us and filter out a negative reaction from us.

These are my fist few ideas. Here I am pretty much practicing what type of environmental I might set my camera up in.

Photoshop Work

Resources used