BROKEN: Rock Paper Scissors

I found the short animation BROKEN: Rock Paper Scissors which has an interesting 2D/3D art style. The environments are particularly beautiful. I like how they have split the scene into foreground, midground, and background, with 3 quite different styles. The background in particular reminds me of the backgrounds in Earle's forest scenes as they are both very flat, use simple colour palettes, and basic shapes. In BROKEN, they use a semi-transparent single plane for each tree, which gives a very nice soft effect.

Before now I was considering using basic matte painting with Earl'es style of trees (see the image below), however I would like to experiment with the technique used in this short animation to add more depth on top of the matte paintings.

Earle's inspirations

I've created a new board on Pinterest - found here - where I have collated a variety of artwork in styles that influenced Eyvind Earle's work on Sleeping Beauty.  As I mentioned in my previous post, Earle was inspired by Tres Riches Heures de Jean, Duc de Berry, Persian miniatures, Japanese prints, Durer, Breughel, Jan van Eyck, and Gothic art.

 Tres Riches Heures de Jean, Duc de Berry perhaps inspired Earle more than any other source. It is a particularly lavish book of hours -a collection of prayers to be said at the canonical hours. Eyvind Earle took key points of his colour palette from here, the lapis lazuli blue of the banners, the yellow-green of Maleficent's flames, the shell pink and paler blue of Aurora's gown. You can also see the flat perspective than Earle uses as well as the tendency for geometric shapes and straight lines.

In this example of french tapestries you can see highly detailed foliage designs that have very similar shapes to those used in Earle's forest scenes.

Eyvind Earle mentions how he emulate the style of Jan van Eyck by rendering elements in the foreground with same crispness as those in the background.

 

I also found this great example of how Earle transforms real life castles into his art style, by flattening the image, breaking it up into simple geometric shapes, and creating regular spacing between the trees.

Research

To find out more about Eyvind Earle's style and the inspiration behind it, I've started gathering some research in the form of reviews, articles, interviews etc. One of the most useful items is the book Once Upon a Dream by Charles Solomon, which looks at various different productions of Sleeping Beauty, looking in particular detail at the two disney films: Sleeping Beauty and Maleficent.

From this research I can pinpoint the key elements that make up Eyvind Earle's signature style and bring some of them into my own work. I would also like to look at some of the artist's work that inspired Earle in order to get a deeper understanding of his style.

Key points from my research:

• Earle was inspired by pre-Renaissance European art, Persian miniatures, Japanese prints. He names Durer, Breughel, van Eyck, and the Tres Riches Heures de Jean, Duc de Berry and 'everything that was gothic' as inspirations. However, Earle reinterprets a lot of these styles with a fifties point of view, and the final confrontation completely abandons the renaissance style for a very abstract look.

• The colours are taken from Tres Riches Heures de Jean, Duc de Berry.

• Disney wanted a 'moving illustration'.

• Earle's art is 'flattened, highly detailed' with an 'emphasis on texture'.

• Earle's backgrounds are rendered with the same focus as the foreground (same style as van Eyck). Illusion of reality is cast aside to create a more unified, stylised look.

• The colour was 'muted' and modulated to ensure clarity and keep backgrounds separate to the action. The colour also emphasises the breadth of the world through tonal recession.

• Light defines where detail is (light has detail, shadow less so).

• He uses a 'strong presence of horizontal and vertical elements' and geometric shapes.

• He uses multiple planes of perspective. Also, perspective is exaggerated in some scenes to evoke emotional discomfort, and flattened in harmonious scenes.

• The film was realised in a wide 2.55:1 aspect ratio to emphasise Earle's paintings.

Information on Maleficent from Once upon a Dream:


For Maleficent, the artists moved away from Earle's style and instead aimed for a realistic look similar to the Celtic moors. However, some of his style is still seen in the film and preliminary studies, and it is interesting to see how they tackled the challenge of bringing his style into 3D.

Earl'es style is probably most apparent in the straight lines and jagged bends used in the production of the thorns, which I think works well. I also like the detailed texture and scale that they used, although in my production I would like to push this even further to make the thorns more stylized.

There are also some interesting digital paintings which show photo-realistic representations of Earle's trees. Again these aren't as stylized as the look I want, but still interesting to see nevertheless.

Time Schedule

One of the most important parts of my year will be time management, as I am juggling major project along with my other assignments. To help with this I have put together an initial schedule for the year. This is just a rough draft, I will revise it once I have a more clear idea of my major project and can identify all the elements that need work. 

The design stage lasts up until the specification deadline, but I plan to have most of it finished in the next couple of weeks. I have allocated most of my time to texturing and dynamics, as these are the biggest sections in my project. Lighting, rendering, and compositing appears to be quite cramped at the end, but by that time I will have handed in my other assignments so will be able to focus all of my attention on major project. Not mentioned on the schedule is my report, which I will be working on throughout the year in the form of this blog. I hope to write updates at least weekly if not more often.

Block test

I decided to put together a simple block test rather than a storyboard, as for my project it is easier and gets the information across better. The block test shows how the camera moves through from one environment to the next, although the composition and timing is not final, this is just an initial test. It flagged up some very important problems, mainly the issue of perspective when working in 3D. Getting a nice angle when travelling up the stairs was particularly challenging, and I would still like to push it more as at the moment it is still quite boring. The camera moving through the trees in the forest works well, although I need to experiment with scale to make the environment feel bigger. I also need to decide how I am going to handle the transition from the thorns to the castle, at the moment I can think of two options:

1. I could build another environment which will lead up to the castle

2. I could cheat by having the thorns fill up the screen entirely, then having a small section of the castle appear through a gap in the thorns (similar to the block test)

To decide which of these will work better I really need to think about the composition of my shots in terms of foreground, middleground, and background, as so far I have not given much thought to matte paintings or any background elements. After I've done that I can create another more detailed block test which should help solve these issues.

Mood board + gathering reference

To start, I gathered images of Sleeping Beauty and Eyvind Earle's artwork. I have a board on Pinterest which I am using to hold all the images I find, which you can find here. This board holds screencaps and concept art for the film as well as artwork by Eyvind Earle which is unrelated to Sleeping Beauty. I also put together a simple moodboard using key images which I provided during my initial pitch. At the bottom are some colour swatches which I took from these images, to look at how my colour palette/mood might change as I progress through the environments.

I tried to identify the common elements and themes in Earle's artwork by doing some quick sketches. The main theme that I found in all of Earle's work is lots of strong geometric shapes and a high level of detail. I particularly like his tree designs which use 90 degree angles almost exclusively to create these highly stylized shapes. This theme continues with the shape of ground by using zigzag edges and vertical line detailing; and again in the shape of the thorns. None of these shapes are realistic and it will be a really fun challenge to try and build shapes like this in 3D whilst still making it appear plausible.

Another key feature of Eyvind Earle's art is the use of perspective. You can see, particularly in the forest and castle interior scenes, that the perspective is not at all realistic. He pushes it to affect the mood of the scene, in the castle scenes the perspective creates these very dynamic shots which are uncomfortable to look at, enhancing the sense of distress. In comparison the forest scenes are totally flat, creating a composition which is calm and easy on the eye. This is something that I would really like to play with in my work, although as I'm not sure how it would be recreated in 3D I will have to do some further research on the subject.

Proposal

Here is the proposal for my project. It briefly outlines what I hope to achieve and some of my thoughts behind it.

For my major project I will be making three environments, for film, based on the art of Eyvind Earle for Disney's Sleeping Beauty. My goal is to create a 'living illustration' by translating the charm and style of Earle's paintings into 3D and avoiding realism or the typical plastic CG look. By incorporating dynamic elements such as moving grass, leaves, water, and growing thorns I hope to bring the environments to life. My end result will be heavily stylized, quite gothic and moody.

The three environments will be:

• A forest scene with a river as the main point of interest. I will use dynamics to simulate wind in the grass/leaves and movement in the water.
• The thorns/castle exterior. The main feature of this section will be growing thorns, which I hope to research in my innovations project. The castle will feature in the background either as a matte painting or a simple model.
• The castle interior. The camera will follow up a spiral staircase into a room with a spinning wheel. I would like to experiment with non-realistic lighting effects in this section, such as a moving glowing light which the camera follows, or a spotlight/glow on the spinning wheel.

I will most likely make this one continuous shot of about 40-60 seconds by creating short 'transitional' environments (eg. the camera moves up from the thorns into a castle window), although I may experiment with different kinds of transitions if this doesn't work. My project is a 50/50 split between the artistic and technical. Whilst there will be a lot of modelling and texturing involved I will also be including a fair amount of dynamics and experimenting with different lighting and rendering styles.

I chose this project as I want to try and bring some of the the appeal of traditional paintings into 3D art. I am a big fan of Disney and whilst I enjoyed their recent cg work (Tangled, Frozen..), I prefer their traditionally animated films. In this project I hope to push the boundaries of cg by bringing in the charm of traditional work to create something exciting and new. I decided to look at Sleeping Beauty in particular as it has a very striking and unique art style, because Disney wanted it to stand out from it's predecessors. This is all down to Eyvind Earle, the film's colour stylist and chief background designer. Disney gave Earle an incredible amount of artistic freedom on the film, resulting in Earle painting the majority of the backgrounds himself. In fact several of the animators working on Sleeping Beauty became disgruntled as they were used having some influence over the style and setting of the film.