Phone Notes: Blade Runner 2049

After many months of being sidetracked by other things I've finally gone through my notes on my phone which are a collection of thoughts on the films I've seen. Most of them were written months ago and since a few thoughts have changed and for the purposes of sharing them, I've formatted them into "reviews". The first is:

BLADE RUNNER 2049

Ana de Armas and Ryan Gosling got distracted by three large billboards outside of  Ebbing, Missouri, in 2049!

Blade Runner 2049 was a film that was unavoidable and necessary to see in cinemas, the original films status as a cult staple of sci-fi filmography precedes it. The visuals, the production design (thanks Weta) and the acting are all incredibly detailed, well realized and utilized to convey a stylish film much in the same vein as Tron Legacy, which to some might seem like a strange and blasphemous connection. The old term 'style over substance' is applicable here, because 90% of what makes the film for me are the visuals and settings which seem to elevate the plot and characters beyond very simple foundations. It’s crazy to think audiences were swept away by James Cameron’s Avatar, specifically the paradise planet of Pandora, which was essentially just a huge jungle, and yet not have the same response to the vast, detailed cityscapes here which hit harder and closer to home with how real and depressing they are.

Agent K can't find MIB Headquarters in this fog.

Sidetracked by presumably more important things is Jared Leto's revolution of androids which never comes to fruition in this film. The slower, more methodical pace of the film might be to blame for that, because the 'ticking clock' element that takes us to the end of the film amounts to a short showdown in a sinking car which leaves Leto's involvement to sink into the depths with the car. Where's the revolution, where's the grand overarching subplot?

Jared Leto is Future Jesus.

I guess I was in a bit of an apathetic mood by the end of the film because 'K's (Ryan Gosling) character goes through an arc that isn’t satisfying at the conclusion. The revelations he (and we as an audience) are presented with I felt were underwhelming because not enough time had been devoted to his character to feel like anything was worth a damn, except for perhaps his relationship with the holgram A.I. (Ana de Armas) another riff on the original film and of Tron Legacy's Quorra. Perhaps it might be Harrison Ford’s character 'Deckard' whose character definitely had more resonance and purpose.

The next generation of advertisements, no more pop-ups, just giant holograms that have motion awareness...

The score is wallpaper, nice sounds for the dreary cityscapes, but it doesn’t have any emotional core to latch onto, the characters aren’t afforded musical identities that grow and change as they do. Although the music, like wallpaper, remains serviceable and perhaps not intended to be as important as the visuals alone, which should be praised and admired like a long episode of Planet Earth and narrated of course by Sir David Attenborough.

Buy it on Blu-ray and watch it on a large enough screen to soak in all the visuals, then watch something else that isn't so bleak and depressing.

Cabbage Pot Pre-Production Diary | "Pottle"

Originally Cabbage was to be the sole character of the story, but as I went along scribbling down ideas and drawing designs for the steam-powered carriage it became clear to me that the story, if it were going to get anywhere, it would need something else - another character to propel it. That character was Pottle, and fittingly the name of the story "Cabbage Pot" had found it's Pot part. Instantly a dynamic was created; two friends going on an adventure, also giving something for Cabbage to bounce off of and grow as a character too. Cabbage is the fat friend popularized in many films, television shows, games and books: Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings, another 'Sam' in the form of Samwell Tarly in Game of Thrones, but the biggest source of inspiration for Pottle I think is the character of 'Chowder' from Gil Kenan's 2006 3D animated film Monster House:

Mitchel Musso as 'DJ' and Sam Lerner as 'Chowder' in Monster House (2006)[1]

In fact, that film probably has given me much inspiration in terms of the tone the story will take and comradery of the friends, the fact that they're willing to help eachother out in dire situations; sometimes they don't get along, they fight and they're stubborn. There's also the supernatural element in that film that makes it effective. What I think separates Monster House from most other children's films is that it has a darker tone than most can get away with. It doesn't obfuscate that horror behind a wall of childish antics, it embraces the horror and there you come away with something genuine which enlivens and makes the characters more believable too.

... 

Unlike the design process for Cabbage which took a while for him to come to fruition in terms of his appearance, that challenge was lessened with Pottle. I knew what he needed to look like and committed to that vision from the get-go. In one sketch I had found him, a large chubby, cantankerous and expressive kid. Over the next few days of designing him and becoming more acquainted with his character and who he was going to be, I found him to be the more interesting of the two characters.
Here in the first sketch I gave him a cloak and a knitted beanie, which wasn't an item of fashion in our counterpart Victorian era history, yet I wanted to give them items of clothing which would better suit them to the world I was creating. These are characters who are relatively poor, who come from backgrounds where clothing is patched-up and never discarded - mixing the old with the new which is hinted at in other design elements of the world.

A theme I wanted to give Pottle was something to do with nature, leaves, trees and all things green, but my next drawing would dress him in the mucky earth tones and orange! I think orange would play nicely alongside Cabbage's purples and it gave him a more boisterous attitude to wear a quite radical colour to other Gromples who prefer a more sophisticated, yet plain attire of a suit.
Like Cabbage I gave Pottle a motif, some pattern that would be somewhere on him which just so happened to be his beanie. Vaguely inspired by Celtic knots but simple and with less going on.

I gave him a button-up cardigan that he'd outgrown or stretched with the addition of his weight gain over the years and it isn't particularly colourful - it's murky and stained and once had a few more buttons which have popped off. He also has a messenger bag which has been patched-up with handkerchiefs and swatches of old clothes, if the green and leaves didn't make it into his costume, it became a part of his bag, with the leaves around the flap.

After this drawing my vision of Pottle was solidified, he turned out quite well according to my mind. Another thing I wanted to do with his character was design someone whose silhouette was distinct from Cabbage's - another callback to Monster House's 'DJ' and 'Chowder'.

Sometime in the middle of designing Pottle, I designed his buttons which I was hoping to somehow work into the story as a catalyst for later events. First I sculpted two buttons from fimo oven-bake clay which were red and had glitter throughout it making it look slightly magical. After that I devoted a page to sketching a few designs with a crack which had been inflicted during a fight with Cabbage (which is yet to be elaborated on).

After they were baked I applied a few splashes of sepia/black ink diluted with water to bring out a few of the details and give it an old and worn look and a bit of gold sharpie for the star on one of them.

I ran out of clay, or enough to make as many as I had hoped but there was a small piece remaining and that sculpt went onto become the final button design which was based on one or two of the sketches above. It was the perfect size and look, even if I didn't think at first it was going to look like anything.

I only had a week cut out of my schedule to roughly animate everything, but I still had time to animate the button falling and cracking in Adobe Animate.

The same process applied to Cabbage in the Animatification stage: breaking down the character design into lines and using contrast to add form. Pottle's face has more protruding features than Cabbage therefore his expressions were quite different to work with.

Animating Pottle was fun, as I had mentioned before, his features made it a different challenge to move all at once. Here's a simple rotation of Pottle's head:

So with Pottle mostly done the next post will be a brief one looking at the carriage designs, then onto the rough animatics which I produced in Adobe Animate for my art installation. Then onto the Witch and many other things!

References:
1. Monster House image sourced from Google Images.

Cabbage Pot Pre Production | "Cabbage"

The first character of Cabbage Pot is the eponymous 'Cabbage'. I'm not sure where his name came from, but I liked the idea of his family being named after various vegetables, fruits, plants and other objects (his younger sister is called 'Cauliflower' and his mother is 'Aubergine'). He went through a few iterations which saw him as an elderly Gromple, fat, thin, crazy, wise, I wanted him to be a wanderer, always traveling, so I drew him with that in mind.

Here are the two moleskine pages of quick sketches of Cabbage. I knew I wanted him to have a unique look or style, which ended up being his scarf, but his facial structure was integral to his look too. Big eyes and a rounded head were features I wanted to keep because it would display a more vulnerable and youthful side to the non-human character. Something that came out of those original sketches was giving him two very distinct front teeth, again giving him a more youthful, yet crazed look.

First fixed Cabbage concept

I moved onto the first blocked-in design of Cabbage after taking a few elements from the sketches and mixing them together. From this, Cabbage went from pauper and wanderer to magician with the simple addition of a cloak and hat. Before now, none of the Gromples I imagined had possessed magical powers or necessitated the attire for cloaks and robes, yet here it worked with Cabbage and thus magic became another figment of the world. Also, like with prior Gromples, I tried to give each one a motif, a special pattern that would reoccur in their clothes, Cabbage is no different.

Detail of the trim design on Cabbage's hat. 

 So that pattern would adorn the hems of his robes, the trim on the hat and the cuffs of his jacket. I was really pleased with how that original drawing turned out and decided to move onto giving him a bit more detail and including a colour scheme. Cabbage is accented with purple details, and the rest of his costume is really mundane and ordinary. He has a shabby quality, expressed in browns and beiges and off whites; he isn't dressed to impress, but still wears a full ensemble suit under his cloak. When thinking about the costume design I drew inspiration, or was thinking about the kind of lived-in quality of Eddie Redmayne's 'Newt Scamander' in the recent Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them film.

Newt Scamander's Costume in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Tweed textures and nothing refined or distinctive for his time, yet still magical for us an audience. Wrapped around Cabbage's neck is a long knitted scarf with arcane alchemical symbols, some based off real symbols, others just random magical-looking symbols, I wanted it to suggest something magical about Cabbage - perhaps it was an heirloom, or it was knitted by his mother - all to suggest more depth to the character. Then I began a process of simplification - breaking down the above drawing into simple shapes, because at this time I was thinking about how to translate the character into a form easier to animate.

I found some textured paper at my art store and some scraps of paper I had saved from other projects and collaged them into a more animated version from the previous drawing. It gave me a good indication of what all the elements look like in a more basic manner.

Something to note on his hair is how jagged and simple it is; animating lots of individual elements such as hair is made extremely difficult the more of it there is to move, anime characters usually have their hair simplified into jagged clusters (even Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh!) to avoid the problem of making the workload difficult. It's also an easy way to suggest that Cabbage is a wild character who doesn't really groom himself or care much for the state of his hair.

The next stage of the design process meant translating Cabbage into animated form, but first I had to draw him in a more stylised way which I've chosen to call "Animatification". The image below is an excerpt from the journal featuring a variety of expressions and poses that try to give me an idea of how he'll look from different angles - how his cloak and scarf move during action. All this was very quick and rough as I was really pressed for time. The development phase began right after giving a proposal to the lecturers of what my project wanted to be which was four weeks into an eleven week course, so everything in this early stage was done under pressure from that damn clock!

In theme with his magician outfit, I had given him a wand, but that element will come into play later with another character, 'Esrae the Witch'. Because Gromples don't have traditional human noses, just Voldemort-esque slits for nostrils, working out the various positions of his head was difficult. I used his mouth to suggest more dimensionality than is actually present to get away with it!



That's it for this post on Cabbage's development, there'll be another post tomorrow finishing off his pre-production phase and then it'll be onto Pottle and Esrae!

Cabbage Pot Pre-Production Diary | The Gromples

I thought it might be a useful tool to post the progress of a new animated feature I'm currently in the very early stages of creating.

For almost two years now my drawings have featured these small skeletal creatures which sprung forth from a small sketch one day whilst on a break during my animation class. The creatures would later be called 'Gromples' - an apt filmic term which roughly means an unrealistic change an art director might request during production; the constant nitpicker who is never truly satisfied. If that name has any resemblance to these creatures, I'm not entirely sure, my main concern was in finding a name which sounded different enough from Goblin or Gremlin! With the advent of a name came the advent of needing a world for these creatures to inhabit and thus came about trying to classify these beings as 'Sprites', a name which is usually ascribed to Fairies, Pixies and other small, magical creatures, mostly those who dwell in forests. The Gromples however were derived from that first sketch, a Station Master dressed in a workman's overalls and carrying an old oil lamp to light his way on dark nights on the platforms.

Already an aesthetic template was chosen, the Gromples' world would be one of industry, echoing late Victorian era Europe. The next few Gromples I drew were for Birthday cards, dressed in suits of various states of disrepair, denoting class and wealth yet without any cohesion or sense of belonging which of course will come later.

It wasn't until my third year and first unit of my final art course at University that these creatures would soon be placed together in the same world, even if no habitats were yet designed (and to this day have still yet to be) for them to live and take on a life of their own. Various questions arose from this melding: What do female Gromples look like? Children Gromples? What apparatus did they use, what do Gromple prams look like? A few of the drawings from that unit became part of an art installation that attempted to show the day-to-day process of my life as written in a journal.

During the time between my university work I was commissioned to create and install an artwork for Grossi Florentino's new bar 'Arlechin'. I had about two weeks to come up with a design and get it all printed and pasted up, settling on the Gromples for the content of the work. They're what I'm comfortable drawing and thought was reasonable enough to fill a twelve metre long wall, throwing a few trees in for good measure. Here's the original draft page for what the illustration would become:

In the top left corner you might be able to discern two thumbnail sketches where I tried to block in how I could use the door to work the characters around - ultimately that proved to be completely useless as I didn't take any measurements from my visit to the location, just a general gist of where things should go. To fill in twelve metres was a challenge at first, but two A3 sized sheets scale up quite nicely to the right dimensions, with a little cropping here and there.

Armed with a mechanical pencil, a biro pen and very sore fingers, the drawing took at least a week to complete, I really had to push myself to get it done to have enough time to scan it professionally, get it printed (60 sheets of A0 tiles) and paste it to the wall! Unfortunately the two Gromple's in the centre, the mother and daughter would be cut out because of the placement of the back door to the restaurant! That was a shame, but I thought having the full three Gromples on the left hand side was more important as that side of the wall has two vents which I was worried would interfere with what I thought was the most important part. Here it is installed, three days of cooking wheatpaste which is sickening to smell and driving into the city with the help of family to get it all up:

The commission cut into the first week of my next unit at uni in which the time came to choose a project to undertake and complete (or at least develop to a certain state of completion) for my final art unit of my Bachelor's degree. At this point I was conflicted. For a while, at least a year, I had been developing another project with a friend from uni. It was and still is a project still too ambitious to attempt where I am now in terms of my skills and confidence as an artist, with my time torn between drawing Gromples and other uni work that demanded attention. So with that project sidelined but not completely forgotten or abandoned I decided my project would follow the Gromples and specifically the creation of a few characters in a new story.

'Cabbage Pot' is that story, all stemming from that first Gromple sketch two years ago. Cabbage, a lowly magician and trader and his best friend who cobbles various nic-nacs together, Pottle. The two friends go around hunting for lost treasure and trade it in their steam-powered horseless carriage.

Something I think worth mentioning at this point is how uncanny a character can come into existence from seemingly disparate places of influence and interest. Nothing comes from a truly unique place, nothing truly original, but the hope of being content with your work is in fooling yourself into believing it to be original enough. The characters of Cabbage and Pottle are at their core archetypes of the common held ideals of best friends; the cheerful fat friend whom I've drawn from much of my own character; the slightly lanky and more normal, yet somehow a social outcast leader, and the comradery between the two. There's nothing magical or otherworldly about them, but that's the power of archetypes in their ability to be familiar and wholesome, loved and recognised - they're coming from the same places we do. They have hearts and can be just as vulnerable to emotions as we are.

Now in these early stages developed over the last month and a half comes the process of breathing life into these beings and giving them a story worth telling.

The following few posts will be chronicling the process of creating the characters and will continue in the future as the journey continues to create the world of Cabbage Pot...