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.