Mikayla Fuehrer - The King and the Pawn

For my next set of lighting tests, I wanted to light a human as our characters lighting is very important. I wanted to experiment with darker and moodier lighting because I am accustomed to making brightly lit scenes already and our film will have night scenes so I want to be able to get darker lighting while still having facial expressions read. I also played with yellow and purple lighting to go with our color motif in the film. 

After doing some shape studies, I wanted to start fleshing the environment out into real drawings to give my team an image of what out setting could potentially look like. As of now, the story has no specific need to be set in a certain place. "I tried to give multiple options for each part of a living space. One of my main thoughts while creating these spaces were, "How are the characters going to move and interact within this space?" I was not just considering the style of furniture, but the overall layout of the room, key places our team could place the camera, and so on. I also put a lot of thought into the design of the windows because in our film, the time of day is important information for the audience, and as such it will affect the lighting and I felt they were an important part of the visual development. 

I did some more shape studies because I wanted to visualize more options. Before I started Page 06, I received some critique from my professor that my work was going more architectural, and that I could try to incorporate more organic shapes and mesh both together. For the last page I tried to add more organic forms and curved lines.

I started a little bit of texture research for our most important prop, our chessboard. I researched different types of materials that chess boards are made out of (even historical ones) and attached to that material I included a visual image from online to give my team an idea of what this material looked like. These specific images above are not planed to actually be used in the film, but rather to give everyone an idea of what it could look like, and what options there are.

I started to do some small lighting tests. I've watched a few videos online to get the basics started. I wanted to start out basic so I have a good grasp on the lighting controls. I have more tests ready to start. I would like to do more fully lit scenes, and work with different colored lights as our film has a lighting story idea right now.  NOTE: First model not mine. I downloaded it from the link below https://www.myminifactory.com/scantheworld/

Environmental Visual Development To begin the environment designs, I started experimenting with basic shapes. The first page focuses on interior layout ideas. I accounted for more simple and modest designs on the left, while going for more lush and formal designs on the right. For the next two pages, I focused on exteriors to explore what type of world the characters are set in. I created more exteriors than interiors for this initial shape exploration to keep in mind the whole overall world of the film, including the environment outside of just the immediate area the characters are filmed in.