Carol's Art - Moon Seed

Although I didn’t post it earlier, these are the illustrations of the final full-colored designs of our characters from Moon Seed.

I haven’t uploaded this earlier, but this is the progress poster I did for the film. This poster depicting the Mural is the in-between step between poster #1 and #3, between night and day, moon and sun (pretty much the same role that the Mural has in the film itself). My idea was to keep the circular motif as a center of attention for all three posters - started by Sam and Liz on the first poster, I kept it consistent on the remaining ones. 

Final poster with fully rendered illustration! I switched the sky and made the brighter area appear on the top where the sun is. Sayori was kept at the center in the iconic sun-ritual pose of the film. I also added more textures to the ground to better match with our poster #2.

Studying different compositions for the final poster. Those illustrations are still not rendered, but very simplified so I can move on based on feedback from class.

Second poster, work in progress! Because our teaser poster was focused on the moth and the moon, this time we decided to have Sayori and the sun during one of the key moments of the film. Sam was responsible for the research and composition, and I was responsible for painting it. I kept the sun the same size as the moon was on our previous poster, but decided to move the title up instead of the lower bottom because I wanted to give further contrast between the posters. One poster is cool, blue, night-themed and has the tittle on the lower third of the composition. This poster is warm, orange, day-themed and has the title on the upper third of the composition.

Other models I did for the environment - stylized rocks and the two first archways on the story.

Different concepts for grass and turnarounds for forest props some modelers could work on them. 

Going back to more orange and earthy tones for our character clothing, I painted a few textures for the shirt and pants on photoshop to see which one would look best on the render.

The pink color for the character texture was based on the class feedback that wantes us to move away a bit from our orange/islander tones we were using on Sayori. It was just a test, but after seeing it on the actual rig we decided to pull back to more orange/earthy tones.

My first experiment with hand-painting photoshop textures for the leaves in our 3D set. We were very happy with the result - we just need more variations on the leaves and it should be good to go.

Using photshop, I painted a base mesh for the sphere and tree variations of leaf clumps. We had a VFX student help us with Houdini to fill up the tree. We liked the final result, except for the fact that it is currently too dense. After that is fixed it will be really close to the references we got!

Kenzie researched different ways we could approach the tree foliage, and we though it would be simpler to use a round base and image planes than modeling each leaf or trying to achieve a full foliage look just using the planes. She sent me this images as reference for the textures. Since I was already working on the bamboo leaves textures, I tool on the texture of the trees as well.

We are looking for a cool monochromatic palette at the beginning of the movie, while it’s still night, with hints of bio luminescence in the magic flora of our land. Then slowly we see warm colors appear, in hints of purple, pink and red, when we approach the sun temple. And finally a magical orange sun rising when the sun ritual is complete.

I did some visual development exploration for the vegetation on the film, based on Asian tropical forests and bamboo/mountain forests.

Another big change was the mouth, which is also a separated shape instead of the bunny-like organic form of the previous design. I did some drawings of the same old expressions just to test out now that the character can more easily open his mouth, and I also drew some storyboard poses such as the awaking moment, the determination flight after Sayori and the concerned look when he drops the moon seed.

Finally the cool glow of the moth illuminates the scene again as Sayori discovers the moon seed on the basket, and finally we go back to super warm and bright colors as the sun is rising.

For the bridge design which I developed, I took inspiration from the stone bridges I found during my research. Stone bridges taken over by moss and plants seemed somewhat ancient and magical to me, so that’s what I went for. I added more reliefs (keeping the same aesthetic from the mural) to the side of the bridge.