Week 2- Developing ideas

After the weekend, myself and the Dans showed each other the work we had produced and made criticisms and agreed on stuff etc. We agreed that the house should be much smaller than what we had first imagined, more like my sketch, and pretty weird and abstract to reflect our personalities. I showed the boys the following images I had found to get their opinions.

I liked the neat clutter and the posh brackets on the walls.


The colour scheme from the library image must have made me think of this image. When I showed Dan R, he really liked the gold colouring, and we decided we would try and include a lot of gold in our ballroom.

Dan C showed us some gargoyle designs he had begun to construct, (gargoyle was now being named as Chester) and how he could animate them. I think it was pretty obvious by then that we were starting to fall into different roles. Dan C= lead animator, Dan R= lead texturer, me= head of style.

Although we had a clearer idea of what we wanted our house to look like, we felt that if we messed around in Maya a bit we could maybe get a clearer idea of how the basic structure would appear.

At first we started off pretty basic, just cubes and triangles. Then we started putting in details that we had seen in our research.

The towers get very skinny at the ends, a tribute to Burton style. I really liked the idea of having a front porch- American Hillbilly style with a little banister marking its boundary. Dan C was really getting into adding bridges and Dan R liked the idea of a courtyard and morbidly placed our graves right at the front of the house! I love the lighting! Dan C was messing around with that. Though as you can see, his version of 'messing around' means creating mini masterpieces! (yay). Still, it was only rough, and we knew that for our final piece alot would probably change.

We decided to have the house on a cliff facing out over the town and scrap the idea of it being built into a cliff as it would be too time consuming and not as dramatic as looking over the villagers.

More rough designs, focusing on objects that could be found within our rooms. Thanks to the prototype, I now knew definitely that I was mainly designing the ballroom with an integrated study. Looked at voodoo dolls, and maybe putting our faces into rock, but I scrapped that idea as I thought it would make us seem that we were full of ourselves. We are, but no-one needs to know that!

‘The Simpsons’ Haloween special inspired me to design the chair. I altered the design to make it into a cat as I love cats, which gave me the idea that maybe we should all design our own chairs and place them by a massive dining table in the ballroom. The idea went down well with Dans. I liked the colour of the chair in the original drawing, but maybe a bit of a darker red for my chair to be more dramatic. I didn’t need to worry about colours or textures yet as we decided we would experiment with them at a later stage.

Tim Burton head paper weight, quick sketch of some towers and a very rough layout of where the dining table would be placed in the ballroom. Me and Dan R couldn’t agree on this one. He wanted the table going down the middle of the room and I wanted it at the end. As neither of us could decide one way or another, we decided to come back to it when we had made more designs.

A rocking chair for my American Hillbilly-style porch! Notice the extra ‘rockers’ to make it more fun when you sit on it, and extra padded seat and head rest for comfort! I decided to axe the extra swirley bits on top as for some reason they made the chair look to me a bit like a torture chair!