Concepts and Sketches

No film is made without piles of concept sketches behind it, and our group was no different.

Working from these moodboards I created (among others), we were able to get a genera; "vibe" for how we wanted out short to go.

After gathering our moodboards and style sheets, we moved on to the concept art stage. We really let loose with this phase of the pipeline, we really wanted a wide pool of creative vision to pull from.

We first began with character design, including the look and feel for other reaper students who will occupy the "IRS" with our protagonists, Shine and Muerto. Below are my own submissions for the character choosing process, named Sachiel and Armisael.

Our general goal was to base our reapers on death figures from many different religions around the world. I chose to look at Hebrew mythology for my characters, I really wanted to do a design that wasn't *too* humanoid. Much of this influence is seen in the second character here, Armisael. The first, Sachiel, is an homage to an Angel from an old-school, trippy, mecha anime: Neon Genesis Evangelion, in both name and look. Given that that particular show dealt a lot with death and moving on, I was inspired to bring in little elements or easter eggs when I could.

After we did our best to round down all our wonderful character designs, we split into different focuses of the short, in order to meet our deadlines for the end of the semester. I'm pretty crazy about environment and set design, so I was eager to help out in those areas.

We wanted the IRS Schoolhouse to exist in a sort of ethereal world, instantly recognizable as not being on Earth/in the Earthly realm. Our main inspiration was the ghost world from Danny Phantom, as well as the floating islands from Avatar. While still a world for the reapers, ie a world of the dead, we didn't want the School to seem sad or depressing. We wanted to promote the idea that death isn't something to fear, to try to move away from generally held stigmas about death. In the end, we plan to have the more vibrant, (psychedelic?) colorful look of the School to contrast the more drab, faded, worn look of the human world, most specifically the old man's house.